Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski
East German politician (1932–2015)
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Key Takeaways
- Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski (3 July 1932 – 21 June 2015) was a politician and trader in the German Democratic Republic.
- Early life He was born in Berlin to a stateless ethnic Russian father and adopted by the Schalcks when he was eight years old.
- His maternal grandfather worked for Stinnes in St.
- He concurrently held the rank of Deputy Minister for Foreign Trade until 1975, when he was promoted to State Secretary (in the GDR, Deputy Minister was ranked lower than a State Secretary), but was only nominally responsible to the Minister.
- In 1983 he led the negotiations with Bavarian leader Franz Josef Strauß to obtain a billion Deutschmarks loan from the West German government.
Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski (3 July 1932 – 21 June 2015) was a politician and trader in the German Democratic Republic. He was director of a main department ('Hauptverwaltungsleiter') in the Ministry for Foreign Trade and German Domestic Trade (1956–62), the Deputy Minister for External Trade (1967–75), and head of the GDR's Kommerzielle Koordinierung (KoKo, 1966–86).
Early life
He was born in Berlin to a stateless ethnic Russian father and adopted by the Schalcks when he was eight years old. His biological father served as a Tsarist officer in World War I and became the head of the Wehrmacht's Russian language interpreter school in World War II; he did not return from Soviet captivity. His maternal grandfather worked for Stinnes in St. Petersburg.
Schalck-Golodkowsky joined the Free German Youth in 1951 and the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) in 1955.
Career in East Germany
In 1966 he was appointed head of KoKo (at that time a newly formed department of the Ministry for Foreign Trade, ten years later it would formally become a powerful independent government agency in its own right) and in 1967 was also appointed a special officer of the Ministry of State Security. He concurrently held the rank of Deputy Minister for Foreign Trade until 1975, when he was promoted to State Secretary (in the GDR, Deputy Minister was ranked lower than a State Secretary), but was only nominally responsible to the Minister. In reality, he only answered to Erich Honecker, Günter Mittag and Erich Mielke.
In 1983 he led the negotiations with Bavarian leader Franz Josef Strauß to obtain a billion Deutschmarks loan from the West German government.
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