Heinz Gronau (1 January 1912 – 28 October 1977) was a communist resistance activist during the Hitler years. He was transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp in 1938. At the concentration camp he became a leading figure in the (covert and illegal) "International Buchenwald Military Organisation" ("Internationale Militärorganisation Buchenwald"). He survived the war and in 1946 joined the (semi-militarised) police service in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. A succession of promotions followed. In 1966 he was promoted to the rank of Major general in the East German Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment. During the final years of his career he combined his overtly military posting with command of the National Department I ("Hauptabteilung I") at the Ministry for State Security ("Stasi"). The department was a specialist intelligence section of the ministry, tasked with attending to the intelligence needs of the ministry's armed units.
Life
Provenance and early years
Heinz Gronau was born in Leipzig, where his father worked as a printer. He grew up and attended school locally, in nearby Treuen, and then, between 1926 and 1930, trained for work as a dental technician. By 1931 he was performing a leadership role with the local Young Communists. As he completed his apprenticeship European economies were undergoing the full backwash from the Wall Street Crash, and Gronau spent the next three years unemployed. Meanwhile, in 1930 he joined the Communist Party. Till 1933 he served as a member of the regional leadership team for Saxony ("Bezirksleitung Sachsen") with the Young Communists. Both before and after 1933 Gronau took part in the struggle against National Socialist populism In 1933 he was arrested and briefly detained in what at least one source refers to as "protective custody" four times. Meanwhile, between 1933 and 1935, as the unemployment situation improved, he was able to support himself through casual work between 1933 and 1935. Gronau was arrested again in 1935: this time there was no quick release. Instead he faced trial. Charged with high treason, he was sentenced to a thirty-month jail term following conviction.
Buchenwald
He completed his sentence at a prison in Zwickau in 1938, but instead of being released, he was now detained at the recently opened Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. Initially he was sent to work at the camp's "Electricians' Workshop". Later he was sent to join the "Electro-plating" section. Here he took part in covert resistance activities and worked in the "military section" of the "Internationale Militärorganisation Buchenwald" / IMO, a shadowy conspiratorial grouping of inmates with communist pasts, a significant number of whom would turn up after 1949 in positions of power and influence in the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Over the years the IMO acquired a considerable stockpile of weapons for future use. They also had access to significant supplies of effective poison, much of it in the form of gases acquired by Gronau in the electro-plating workshops where he worked. Gronau was involved in constructing and installing secret radio transmitters and receivers. He was also among those who manufactured stabbing and cutting weapons for possible future use while in the camp.
Leipzig
The weapons store that the inmates had collected found a use on 11 April 1945 when Gronau participated in a "self-release" operation with other Buchenwald camp inmates. By this time, from the perspective of any guards who had not fled in response to the report of atrocities committed by the Red army advancing rapidly from the east, the camp was being evacuated by the German government, and there are reports of many thousand inmates being forced to join the evacuation marches, but Gronau appears not to have been among these. War ended, formally, during the first week of May 1945. Heinz Gronau made his way home to Leipzig, which had been liberated from National Socialism by US forces during April 1945. However, the leaders of the United States and Soviet Union had already agreed between them a post-war division of Germany whereby the whole of Saxony would be administered by the Soviet Union. In July 1945 US forces therefore withdrew from Leipzig and the surrounding region, leaving the city to which Gronau had returned administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone. During 1945/46 he was placed in charge of the city's social and youth welfare office.