[1] Rudolf "Rudi" Wetzel was born in Rechenberg, a small town in the mining region of Saxony on the frontier with what was, at that time, the Austrian province of Bohemia.
(usually identified in English language sources as "Hitler's Black Book"), a list of (in the end) 2,820 individuals who would, in the event of a successful German invasion and occupation of Britain, be sought out by commando task forces and arrested as a priority.
Even if subsequent events may have vindicated Wetzel's judgements, incurring the suspicions of the man who later became the first leader of the German Democratic Republic is unlikely to have boosted his career prospects in Germany's Soviet occupation zone after 1945.
[4] He was appointed to a senior management position with the press and broadcasting department of the Central Committee of the newly formed Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED).
[1] The contentious launch in April 1946 of the SED had been part of a nation building exercise planned with Moscow support by a team of leading exiled German communists during the war years and implemented during the later 1940s.
After a few months he was switched to Wochenpost, a weekly mass-circulation newspaper newly launched by the party central committee to cover politics, economics, business and the arts.
[1] On 27 October 1956, shocked by the attitude of the party leadership to the popular uprisings in Hungary and Poland, Wetzel joined with fellow editors to publish an open letter of protest addressed to the politburo.
They called for "information faithful to the truth" ("wahrheitsgetreue(n) Informationen") and adherence to "Leninist standards of party and national life" ("Leninschen Normen des Partei- u.
[1] The wheels of the East German power structure ground into action and in January or March 1957, under pressure from the authorities, Wochenpost dispensed with the services of their founding editor.
The irritation of the leader, Walter Ulbricht, had been exacerbated by the fact that the editors' open letter to the politburo had included a line on the subject of "press freedom" which had already been rejected by the Central Committee when proposed for a prominent feature in Neues Deutschland, East Germany's principal daily newspaper.
[5] During the ensuing years Wetzel was regarded with renewed suspicion by the East German leadership, and he held a succession of relatively low-profile journalistic positions.
In June 1957 he became an editor with "Freie Welt", an illustrated magazine, but in February 1958 he was dismissed without notice on account of his "ideological failings" by the "Culture and Progress" publishing house.
[6] But there was a reluctance on the part of the leadership to exaggerate the significance of the work, coupled with a determination to present Bahro as a lone voice:[6] possibly for this reason, Wetzel was not subjected to any serious state mandated retribution in respect of his involvement with "The Alternative".
Across the border in West Germany it was a different matter: newspapers such as the Frankfurter Rundschau marked the birthday of the communist "non-conformist" and "lateral thinker", quoting a maxim which he had himself used in the part: "Head held high and not the hands" ("Kopf hoch und nicht die Hände").
[6] A couple of weeks later, however, on 25 January 1990, as the authorities struggled to come to terms with the changes slowly but surely transforming the old German Democratic Republic, an "extraordinary congress" of the VDP rehabilitated Wetzel.