GDR Diplomatic Passport Doernberg

I was able to acquire several East German Diplomatic passports of Prof. Doernberg, a quite interesting person. Prof. Stefan Doernberg was not only an East German ambassador to Finnland, but as a young Russian officer, he eye-witnessed the signing of the German surrender on May 8th, 1945.

Stefan Doernberg (21 June 1924 – 3 May 2010) was born the son of an official of the KPD. In 1935, he and his parents emigrated to the Soviet Union, where he attended the Karl Liebknecht School. In 1939, he joined the KJVD and received his Abitur in Moscow. On the day of Operation Barbarossa, he joined the Red Army. He was temporarily interned in a work camp in the Urals because of his German origins, but he returned from his stay there to the front after schooling in the Comintern. As a Lieutenant in the 8th Guards Army, he participated in Ukraine, Poland, and Berlin battles. In 1945 Doernberg returned to Germany. From 1946 to 1950, he worked with the Soviet military administration in Mecklenburg as a speaker and interpreter with General Mikhail Alexandrovich Skossyrev. From 1946 to 1950, he was an external political editor of the daily newspaper Rundschau. During this time, from 1947 to 1951, he graduated from the Lomonosov University in Moscow. From 1950 to 1955, he worked as an editor of the German edition of the magazine Sowjetliteratur. In 1955 he took over the Chair for General History at the Institute of Social Sciences at the Central Committee of the SED.

In 1959, he became involved in the struggle for the economic disempowerment of German imperialism in the area of the German Democratic Republic and its significance in the context of the antifascist-democratic revolution to Dr. Phil. Ph.D. GDR Diplomatic Passport Doernberg

From 1961 to 1971, Doernberg served as Director of the German Institute for Contemporary History (DIZ) in East Berlin. In 1963 he received a professorship for the history of German and international workers’ movements. He was the scientific secretary of the German section of the commission of the historians of the GDR and the USSR from 1957 to 1962, and from 1964 he was chairman of the GDR section of the research institutions of the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and the USSR on European security issues. In 1966 he was awarded the academic degree of a doctor of the historical sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (Dr. sc.). From 1971 to 1977, he served as deputy director of the Institute for International Politics and Economics in Berlin and from 1970 as secretary, general secretary, and vice-president of the GDR committee for European security. From 1977 to 1982, he was director of the Institute for International Relations at the Academy of Political Science and Law. GDR Diplomatic Passport Doernberg

From 1983 to 1987, Stefan Doernberg was an ambassador of the GDR in Finland. He was a member of the Peace Council of the GDR and a member of the SED. In 1964 he received the Order’s Order of Merit in bronze in 1966 in silver and in 1984 in gold. The GDR started a diplomatic relationship with Finland in 1973 and had since then only five ambassadors in Finland will the end of the GDR in 1990.

On May 3, 2010, shortly before his departure to Moscow, where he was to attend the celebrations celebrating the 65th anniversary of the victory over National Socialist Germany, Stefan Doernberg died in Berlin.

Doernberg in his own words on the historical event in May 1945
On May 8, 1945, I experienced in Berlin, as an eye-witness of the historic event, when the leadership of the OKW in Berlin-Karlshorst had to sign unconditionally surrender. As a German anti-fascist, who had participated in the last great battle of the War, in the rank of lieutenant in the 8th Army, I had been commissioned to take a sound recorder from the House of the Reichsdeutsche Rundfunks in the Masurenallee in Berlin West to the staff of Marshal Zhukov. We drove through the so terribly destroyed but already peaceful Berlin.

For me, the war had actually ended on May 2nd. On this day, I had typed the order from General Weidling for the first time on a typewriter and then read through a loudspeaker in different parts of the city. Thus, tens of thousands of German soldiers learned their commander’s instructions, which had been issued too late, that any further resistance would be pointless. Quite oddly, I found the reasoning of General Weidling. “The Fuehrer hath given himself up, and left us alone, whom we had sworn to him”.

I had experienced the war in front, although with a few interruptions, since 22 June 1941, the attack of Hitler’s Germany on the Soviet Union. From his authors, it was planned as the worst crime of the 20th century and then implemented perversely and brutally. I saw refugees and burned earth from Moscow and Stalingrad to Poland, then on German soil. Even worse was the sight of the extermination camp Majdanek, other concentration camps, and the ghetto of Lodz. Thus, the extended “German habitat” was to be for the European peoples, which was at most the fate of labor slaves of the large capital of the “Third Reich”. For this reason alone, I regarded the act of liberation of the anti-Hitler coalition, which had to be fought above all with so many victims of the peoples of the USSR, as the salvation of human civilization before the threatening fall into barbarism. GDR Diplomatic Passport Doernberg

The passport lot consists of three East German Diplomatic Passport Prof. Doernberg, one diplomatic of his wife, a CCCP passport of his wife, and an early 1960 East German passport. All documents are in excellent condition. A fantastic East German Diplomatic Passport set of a remarkable German personality who experienced so much in history. Happy to have these documents in my archive. GDR Diplomatic Passport Doernberg

The red USSR passport was issued by the embassy of the USSR in the GDR and had two extensions till 1991 and till 1996. The blue GDR passport is from Doernberg’s mother, issued in 1960 with visas and travels to USSR and Western Europe (which was unusual, especially in 1961 when THE WALL was built). GDR Diplomatic Passport Doernberg