[1] He was a member of the KgU ("Combat Group against Inhumanity") and became a victim of the epidemic of show trials that hit the country in the first half of the 1950s.

[2] The father of Gerhard Benkowitz was an army officer from Apolda in Thuringia who had volunteered to serve in the First World War.

[3] During the twelve year Nazi period the father held a position as an Ortsbauernführer (local farmers' leader).

At this time Benkowitz's father was arrested by the Soviet Secret Police: he disappeared and his fate remains unknown.

[3] Benkowitz obtained work initially as a sales representative for a food business, and later as an officer with the town administration in Weimar.

He hoped that the KgU's Berlin contacts would enable him to learn the whereabouts of his father who had been arrested by the Soviet secret police in 1945.

[3] With the outbreak in 1950 of the Korean War there was a concern that something similar might blow up between the two politically polarised halves of Germany: if it had, the KgU would have been seen as a potential fifth column for the west behind the eastern front line, and the photographs accumulated by Benkowitz's Weimar based group of bridges and other installations vulnerable to sabotage would have been useful for identifying targets.

[3] After 1952 the KgU turned away from their militant strategy,[4] however, and Benkowitz's group took to more directly political activities, such as distributing fly-leaflets, gathering information, and sending threatening letters to East German government officials.

The show trial which took place subsequently had been planned by the Party Leadership at the beginning of 1955, but at that stage the Benkowitz and Kogel couples had not been listed as targets of "Operation Blitz".

[3] During interrogation Gerhard Benkowitz admitted to his preparations for blowing up the Bleiloch valley dam, the six arch railway bridge at Weimar and other appropriate sabotage targets.

[4] The Stasi officers working on Benkowitz and the public defense lawyer had persuaded him that a detailed self-incrimination and remorse could save him.

[4] The more heavily implicated Weimar group members, Benkowitz and Kogel, were tried jointly with three other accused, Willibald Schuster and Gerhard Kammacher, rail workers from Triptis, and the Berlin Veterinary student Christian Busch, who was the only one of the five who was known, from the Stasi's own information, to have had direct contact with the KgU leader in Berlin, Gerd Baitz.

[4][6][7] The party newspaper also reported a letter from his teaching colleagues at the Pestalozzi School calling for "strong punishments against the five agents" ("die strenge Bestraffung der fünf Agenten") and pledging to be "more vigilant than ever in preventing diminution of the success of our Worker-Peasant state by criminal elements of this kind".