Harri Czepuck

Harri Czepuck
Born	30 July 1927 Breslau, Lower Silesia, Germany
Occupation	Journalist Newspaper editor Trades union president Writer
Nationality	German

Harri Czepuck (b. Breslau 30 July 1927 – d.14 June 2015) was a German journalist.

In 1967 he was appointed President of the Journalists' Union in the German Democratic Republic.

Czepuck trained as an insurance salesman. Between 1944 and 1945 he served in the army, being captured by the Soviets near Halbe, and becoming a prisoner of war detained, initially, by the Soviets and subsequently by the Poles until 1949. In January 1949 he became editor of "Die Brücke", a German prisoners of war newspaper.

By now the frontier between Germany and Poland had moved westward along with millions of Germans. As part of this process Breslau was now a Polish city. In June 1949 Czepuck was released from imprisonment not in his former home district but in the Soviet occupation zone which was in the process of mutating into the German Democratic Republic. He lost no time in joining the new country's newly formed ruling SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany/Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands). He started work, initially as a volunteer, for Neues Deutschland, a leading national newspaper, and progressed through a succession of positions in the editorial department, as a department head and as the newspaper's correspondent in Bonn. In January 1966 he was appointed Deputy Chief Editor. However, at the start of October 1971 he lost the position on account of conflicts with , the editor in chief. This freed him up to spend more time on Union business.

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