[1] Most of his professional career took place in the German Democratic Republic where he is known as "Nestor des Naturschutzes in Ostdeutschland" (loosely "East Germany's original Nature Conservationist").

[2] He also designed the long-eared owl silhouette, originally on a yellow background, which since 1989 has been adapted and become known across Germany as a symbol identifying conservation areas.

However, Germany underwent significant regime change in January 1933 when the NDSDAP (Nazi Party) took power, and lost little time in imposing the country's first twentieth century one-party dictatorship.

In April 1933 Kurt Kretschmann gave notice that he was a committed pacifist[3] and went to live with a friend in a garden summer house in Rüdnitz near Bernau, just outside Berlin on its north-east side.

[4] In August 1939 a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union opened the way for a rerun of the Partitions of Poland between the two dictatorships, and this in turn triggered a return to "world war" involving most of Europe which broke out the next month.

In April 1946, across the entire zone, the contentious merger of the KPD and more moderately left-wing SPD prepared the ground for a return to one-party rule.

Kretschmann was one of many former communists who lost little time in signing their membership across to the resulting Socialist Unity Party (SED / Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), although the focus of his future career would lie outside mainstream politics.

Forty years later, in November 1989, protestors beached the Berlin Wall and it became apparent that the Soviet army had no instructions to apply force to crushing the rising tide of anti-government discontent in East Germany.

His period in the Rüdnitz garden summer house in the 1930s and subsequent extended walking tour had awakened in Kretschmann an interest in nature conservation.

Kretschmann masterminded and ran the "Haus der Naturpflege" for many years, although in 1982[2] or 1984,[4] by which time he and his wife were both in their late 70s, the property was handed over to the local municipality.

[2][9] Kurt Kretschmann's record as a strident free thinking pacifist-vegetarian and army deserter was not something that would have instantly endeared him to the authorities during the four decades when he lived in a country frequently identified by German journalists and historians as Germany's second one-party dictatorship.

[1] On 2 March 1999 the couple were made Honorary citizens of Bad Freienwalde, which is where he lived, participating fully in the local community until his death on 20 January 2007, aged 92.