Erich Apel

Erich Apel worked during World War Two as a rocket engineer at the Peenemünde Army Research Center in Nazi Germany. After his return from the Soviet Union, where he had forcibly worked for rocketry development under the Operation Osoaviakhim until 1952, he became an East German party official. During the later 1950s, he was increasingly involved in economic policy, serving from 1958 as head of the German Democratic Republic's Economics Commission in the Politburo. He was seen as a reformer. However, economic reform rapidly fell off the agenda after October 1964 when Nikita Khrushchev fell from power in Moscow.