Günther Gereke

Günther Gereke was a German lawyer and politician whose political career spanned the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany and postwar West Germany. As the Reichskommissar for Employment Creation, he developed the public works employment plan enacted by the last Weimar cabinet. At first retained in the cabinet formed by Adolf Hitler, he was soon purged and jailed several times under the Nazi regime. Following the end of the Second World War, as a supporter of German unification and an opponent of alliance with the Western Bloc, he broke with German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and defected to East Germany in 1952.