Early years Kretschmann attended a local school in Berlin and undertook an apprenticeship in
tailoring before getting a job as a cutter with a Berlin tayloring firm. However, Germany underwent significant regime change in January 1933 when the
NDSDAP (Nazi Party) took power, and lost little time in
imposing the country's first twentieth century
one-party dictatorship. One side-effect of the
new government's policy was a switch away from men's suits to production of uniforms by Kretschmann's employer. In April 1933 Kurt Kretschmann gave notice that he was a committed
pacifist and went to live with a friend in a garden summer house in
Rüdnitz near
Bernau, just outside Berlin on its north-east side. He now became a
vegetarian and embarked on a period of intense physical training which included a 10 km long-distance run each day. He also experimented with his diet and took the opportunity to expand his knowledge of world literature, the classics and philosophical scholars, while playing the violin recreationally. He now undertook a lengthy walking tour, reportedly of 12,000 km, across
Germany,
Switzerland and
Northern Italy. Impressions accumulated during this time affected him deeply. He refused to work in a munitions factory and was forced to work on the recently constructed
Königsberg military airfield. on the site where in 1960 he and his wife would build their home, and which is today designated the "House for the care of Nature" (
"Haus der Naturpflege"), at
Bad Freienwalde in eastern Brandenburg. During the years between 1945 and 1989, with few fresh vegetables available in the East German cities, the opportunity to grow vegetables afforded by even small domestic gardens was often much prized by city-dwellers with access to country cottages or relatives outside the cities. Public interest in vegetable growing was correspondingly more mainstream than it would become following
reunification. Kretschmann masterminded and ran the
"Haus der Naturpflege" for many years, although in 1982
The pacifist vegetarian Kurt Kretschmann's record as a strident free thinking pacifist-vegetarian and army deserter was not something that would have instantly endeared him to the authorities during the four decades when he lived in a country frequently identified by German journalists and historians as Germany's second
one-party dictatorship. After the
East German regime collapsed in
1989/90 he himself became more vociferous on some of the issues involved and on his own experiences both of war and of vegetarianism. Subsequently, these aspects of Kretschmann's personality have become more widely known. He also wrote poetry. ==Recognition==