He served as a soldier in the German Wehrmacht (ultimately holding the rank of Lieutenant) and was in Soviet POW camps until 1949, during which he attended an Antifa school.

In 1953, he briefly served as Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, succeeding Wilhelm Schröder.

After attending the Central School for Agricultural Policy of the Central Committee of the SED in Schwerin, on 29 October 1953, he was appointed Secretary of State in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry by Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl.

[2] From 1955 to 1963, he again served as Minister of Agriculture, Procurement, and Forestry, succeeding Paul Scholz.

[citation needed] From 1963 to 1964, he pursued higher education studies, and in 1971, he earned his doctorate at the Berlin School of Economics and Law with the thesis The Role and Position of Land Improvement in the Intensification of Agricultural Production and the Social Development of Socialist Agriculture and Some Fundamental Problems of the Further Application of the Economic System of Socialism in the Period up to 1980.