Heinrich Albertz was born in
Breslau (present-day Wrocław, Poland), in the
Prussian province of Silesia, to the court preacher and consistorial councilor Hugo Albertz and his second wife Elisabeth, née Meinhof. His elder half brother was the
Resistance fighter
Martin Albertz. Having obtained his baccalaureate (
Abitur) in 1933, he went on to study theology at the universities of
Breslau,
Halle and
Berlin. Under the
Nazi regime, he maintained contact to circles of the banned Social Democratic Party. As a member of the
Confessing Church opposing the Nazis, he showed solidarity with the imprisoned pastor
Martin Niemöller, was arrested several times and finally conscripted into the
Wehrmacht in 1941. After
World War II Albertz moved to
Celle, where the
British occupation authorities entrusted him with the reception of
expellees and displaced persons. He joined the SPD and in 1946 became a member of the
Landtag of Lower Saxony. In 1948 he was appointed minister for expellee affairs in the
Lower Saxon state cabinet under Minister-President
Hinrich Wilhelm Kopf; in 1951 he became state minister of social affairs. Since 1950 he was also a member of the SPD federal board. He was a Christian pacifist and opposed the production and placement of nuclear weapons on German soil. When the Kopf cabinet was succeeded by the right-wing government of Minister-President
Heinrich Hellwege upon the 1955 state elections, Albertz continued his career as a state secretary under the West Berlin mayor
Otto Suhr. In 1961 he became
Senator (minister) of the Interior under Mayor
Willy Brandt and deputy mayor in 1963. When Brandt joined the German
grand coalition government of Chancellor
Kurt Georg Kiesinger, Albertz succeeded him and was elected governing mayor of West Berlin by the
Abgeordnetenhaus parliament on 14 December 1966. Albertz, standing in the shadow of his popular predecessor, led the Social Democrats into the following state election held on 12 March 1967. Nevertheless, the SPD was able to maintain its absolute majority. Albertz' term in office was characterized by the rising
student revolts culminating during the state visit by Shah
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his wife
Farah Pahlavi. On 2 June 1967, Pahlavi was received in West Berlin, accompanied by violent clashes of protesters with Iranian
secret police collaborators and massive police forces, whereby the student
Benno Ohnesorg was shot by police officer
Karl-Heinz Kurras, an incident that became a turning point in the devolution of the German student movement. On 28 September Mayor Albertz was forced to resign after an investigation into the police's role in the killing. The Abgeordnetenhaus elected
Klaus Schütz his successor. From 1970 he worked as a
pastor, from 1974 to 1979 in Berlin-
Zehlendorf. When on 27 February 1975 the
Movement 2 June militant group (named after the obit of Benno Ohnesorg) abducted the
Christian Democrat candidate for Mayor of West Berlin
Peter Lorenz, Albertz agreed to accompany the exchanged prisoners, among them
Verena Becker and
Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, on their flight to
South Yemen. Retired in 1979, he joined the German
peace movement of the 1980s and several protests against the
NATO Double-Track Decision. Albertz died in a Bremen nursing home on 18 May 1993. ==References==