[2] Werner Lamberz was killed in a helicopter accident in Libya shortly after take-off, following a meeting in a large desert encampment with the Libyan head of government, Muammar Gaddafi.

Mario Adorf encountered Peter Lamberz on his first visit to the two bedroom apartment where the family lived in Mayen's Koblenzer Straße and later recalled, "The father looked in a bad way.

[1] The final months of the war found him helping to keep his father hidden in the Mayen area, also undertaking some work for a nursery garden and for a building company.

Despite the deep mutual hatred between proponents of the Nazism with which he had grown up in Germany and of the Communism advocated by the Soviet occupier, the education that Werner Lamberz had received in a school for future Nazi leaders evidently provided appropriate training for a leadership role within the ostensibly Communist FDJ organisation.

Werner Lamberz achieved a series of rapid promotions within the local party hierarchy till 1949, when he took on equivalent responsibilities in respect of the occupied state of Brandenburg.

[1] Between 1955 and 1959 he also served as the FDJ's permanent representative from East Germany to the Central Council of the Budapest based World Federation of Democratic Youth, with which he would retain links throughout his subsequent career.

[2] Additionally in 1967, the year of his admission to the Central Committee, a seat was found for Werner Lamberz in the "Volkskammer" ("People's Chamber"), officially the national legislature of the German Democratic Republic.

The 1971 Party Conference was significant for another reason: Walter Ulbricht had finally been persuaded out of most of his offices a couple of months earlier and, with the encouragement of General Secretary Brezhnev, June 1971 marked the dawn of the Honecker era.

Lamberz was a "hands-on" propaganda chief, prone to telephoning editors individually late at night to give final instructions or to berate one of them savagely in respect of a minor oversight.

The West German diplomat-journalist Günter Gaus recalled the persuasive volubility of the Central Committee Secretary at social functions, cocktail glass in hand, switching back and forth between French and Russian.

In 1976, at the opening ceremony for the People's Palace in Berlin, the party opinion former told one stunned newsman from the west that he only had to telephone ("einfach anrufen"), if "one of those Foreign Ministry bureaucrats failed to come up with the goods" ("...den Bürokraten im Außenministerium etwas nicht klappt").

[2] With Werner Lamberz in charge of "agitation and propaganda", an East German "media elite" grew up which in some ways resembled developments in western Europe and North America more closely than anything to be found in other central European countries sponsored from Moscow.

Although Lamberz evidently enjoyed the opportunities to socialize with attractive women, he was nevertheless clear that these functions also served the important political purpose of providing support for the regime from a flattered and contented media class.

[9] At 21.30 on 6 March 1978, shortly after taking off en route back from the tented encampment at Wadi Suf al-Jin (Wādī Sawfajjīn), the Super Frelon helicopter carrying Lamberz and three other members of the East German delegation fell into a tailspin and crashed.

[9] The leadership in Libya did not permit any external investigation of what happened, but according to the Libyan accident report the helicopter reached an altitude of about 30 meters, and then attempted to move off to the left, but instead fell like a stone to the ground and exploded.

[11] Nevertheless, Werner Lamberz received a state funeral and an urn believed to contain his ashes following cremation was placed beside the remains of other privileged East German politicians in the cemetery at Berlin-Lichtenberg.