After 1945, he chose an academic career, becoming a university professor and economist, while also engaging in the Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime ("Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes") and its successor organisation.
[6] In fact, he exhibited practical and valuable skills, constructing and maintaining radio receivers enabling his parents and their political associates to listen (illegally) to broadcasts transmitted from London and Moscow.
[1] He also led a form of double life, acting as a courier, taking messages to Switzerland, where his mother had relatives.
In 1940 Kurt Langendorf was conscripted into the army and for a time seriously contemplated escaping across the Swiss border and seeking refuge with relatives.
[1] He was persuaded by comrades to respond positively to the call-up, however, in order to acquire military knowledge and pursue antifascist political work with fellow soldiers.
Langendorf was shot and rendered unconscious: after the front line had rolled back and forth for several days he was found by German soldiers and taken to the field hospital.
[4] Langendorf now set about obtaining a university place to study engineering at Karlsruhe, not far from his mother's Mannheim home.
This formed the basis for his doctoral dissertation on the socialist transformation of capitalist industry during the change-over period to socialism in the People's Republic of China.
[4] Subsequently he took also a professorship with the "Fritz Heckert trades union college" in Bernau bei Berlin, where he continued to work till his retirement in 1985.
After the demise of the separate East German state, in 1990 he was a co-founder of the "Berlin Association of former participants in Anti-fascist Resistance, victims and survivors of Nazi persecution" ("Berliner Vereinigung ehemaliger Teilnehmer am antifaschistischen Widerstand, Verfolgter des Naziregimes und Hinterbliebener" / B. V. VdN), and he took on its chairmanship in 2004.