Former GDR minister Hans Reichelt has died in Berlin at the age of 99. This was confirmed by his son Erhard Reichelt to the German Press Agency. Hans Reichelt was a member of the Democratic Farmers' Party (DBD) in the GDR. He was initially Minister of Agriculture and Forestry in the 1950s and 1960s and was Minister of Environmental Protection and Water Management from 1972 to 1990.
In the course of the peaceful revolution in the GDR, Reichelt resigned. During the GDR era, the environment was considered to be heavily polluted in many places, which led to the growth of the opposition movement. Civil rights activists campaigned for education and improvements and founded so-called environmental libraries.
According to his publisher Frank Schumann, Reichelt worked until the end on a publication about the environmental policy of the GDR. Former Federal Environment Minister Klaus Töpfer (CDU) had wanted to write a foreword for it. Both were friends, said Schumann. They were no longer able to finish work on the publication. Töpfer died in June 2024, Reichelt on Tuesday. He last lived in Schöneiche near Berlin.
After the end of the GDR, Reichelt, together with other former functionaries, took legal action against the reduction of his retirement benefits. In 2010, however, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that he had to accept the cuts. The court ruled at the time that some of the payments were not performance-related, but should also be seen as a reward for political conformity and unconditional fulfillment of the SED's claim to power.
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