[5] Renewed economic austerity following the Wall Street Crash triggered a period of accelerating political polarisation in Germany, and Gerstner chose the extreme left, in 1931 joining the "German Youth of 1 November 1929" scouting group, which tended to take its lead from the Communist Party.
[1] Fellow members whom he came across at this time included Friedrich Wolf, Harro Schulze-Boysen, Heinrich, Count von Einsiedel and the group's founder, Eberhard Koebel.
[2] It was on the recommendation of the head of the legal department at Deutsche Bank that Gerstner wrote his doctoral dissertation on aspects of the modalities of interbank payments ("Treugiroverkehr").
[1][8] Gerstner passed his Level 1 national law exams in 1935 and embarked on the next stage of the legal traineeship ("Rechtsreferendariat"), starting with six months at the district court in Rheinsberg.
That was followed by a six month period working at a solicitors' office in Berlin that specialised in cases that involved economics, where (despite the growing prevalence of state mandated antisemitism since 1933) two of the senior lawyers were of Jewish provenance.
After a few weeks he was offered a permanent position at the newly expanded trade mission, and his status as an "articled law clerk" was apparently suspended or overlooked.
In August 1939 all the trade mission staff in Paris were returned to Berlin where Gerstner pursued his legal traineeship, employed as a "Gerichtsassessor" (loosely: "trainee judge").
[9] The simultaneous Invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, launched in September 1939, had triggered the Second World War, and shortly after passing his law exams he received call-up papers requiring him to join the army.
[1] In his own later autobiographical contributions he indicated that this was more a continuation of his previous role than might appear from the job title: he was also keen to stress the difference between members of the permanent diplomatic corps hierarchy and those, such as himself, seconded to the embassy from outside the "civil service" talent pool.
He was able to support the French Resistance by secretly passing on information and, especially before 1943, by providing travel permits for the unoccupied southern part of France, thereby rescuing numerous Jewish families facing the threat of deportation to death camps in Germany.
[1] During the second half of 1944 and then till the war ended in May 1945 Gerstner was back in Berlin employed, at least officially, at the Foreign Ministry, in the "Special office for news procurement" ("Sonderreferat für Nachrichtenbeschaffung").
[2] It has been suggested - perhaps uncharitably - that this gave him an opportunity to hone a peculiar talent for charming people into providing information that he could then pass on for pecuniary gain, which after 1975 would by of significant value to the East Germany Ministry for Security (Stasi).
On 2 May 1945, a few days before the formal end of the war, the local Soviet commander appointed Karl-Heinz Gerstner to serve as "second deputy mayor" in Berlin-Wilmersdorf.
[1] He was now taken to in the underground NKVD prisoner of war holding centre in what had previously been the cellar for keeping the bodies of dead animals cool at the former Veterinary Medicine Institute in central Berlin.
It had taken his wife six months to organise the written statements, and she had entered a closed military zone in the city "under fire" from a Soviet sentry in order to hand over the papers.
As early as July 1946 the occupying powers permitted Gerstner to visit France in order to say "farewell" to people whom he had last known under wartime conditions (and possibly also to thank in person some of those whose written testimonies had contributed to his release from detention six months earlier).
In Autumn 1946 he was recruited into the "National German administration for inter-zonal and foreign trade" ("Deutsche Zentralverwaltung für Interzonen- und Außenhandel") which the Soviets were setting up.
[9] They cited strong doubts over Gerstner's assertion that he had joined the Nazi Party back in 1933 only because he had been mandated to do so by a communist student organisation, and they speculated over a possible "connection" to the Soviet security services.
However, many in his social circle were living in the US sector where he would visit and engage in discussions with politically like-minded friends including Iwan Katz and Hans Oliva-Hagen.
In 1955 he started making weekly contributions as a commentator to a programme of economic analysis, transmitted each Sunday on DDR1, a national radio channel in East Germany.
He continued to give these radio talks till 1988,[1] concluding each week with the words "sachlich, kritisch und optimistisch wie immer" (loosely "as ever, factual, critical and optimistic"), a motto the first part of which he would later re-activate as the title for his 1999 autobiography.
In 1976 Krug was banned from performing in public because he participated in protests against the expulsion from the country and deprivation of citizenship suffered by his friend, the popular singer Wolf Biermann.
Staadt's tone is notably less shrill than Ali's, but he does not entirely exonerate Gerstner of the implicit charge that his memoire is excessively selective in its treatment of the Stasi connections.
Although the changes that heralded the end of the East German dictatorship were largely peaceful in nature, many of the carefully stored and indexed records kept in the regional Stasi offices were hastily gathered up and incinerated.
In many cities, when they realised what was being done, indignant citizens broke in to the offices to try and ensure that as many as possible of the records might be retained, in order to be used evidence in the event of future prosecutions.
Staadt is not entirely persuaded by the thread he identifies in Gerstner's book whereby the author was constantly on the right side of history even where he pretended not to be, as a socialist student who joined the Nazis to resist them from within, as an embassy worker under the Nazis who helped the French Resistance, as an East German socialist who always knew what was wrong with the system, who sympathised with the victims of the Prague Spring and who was right all along about Gorbachev.
[4] Gerstner writes in his autobiography that he was asked by the Politburo member Hermann Axen to involve himself socially with the western diplomats "in support of a peaceful future", and to provide reports for the Stasi on matters which might be relevant to government foreign policy.
Gaus' assessment, passed on by Gerstner in 1976, that the flood of applications to leave the country indicated that "the political situation in the German Democratic Republic [was] not very stable" might be seen as a simple "diplomatic report".
There was nothing innocuous about handing over a text critical of the government drafted by Wolfgang Harich, or the details of what was said at a meeting involving Manfred Krug in the private home of a US citizen.
[4] By the time he reaches his concluding paragraph, Jochen Staadt's review of Gerstner's autobiography has become as angry as Ali's: "What is presented as factual, critical and optimistic is in reality shallow, mawkish, opportunistic and untruthful.