Josef Duchač

Josef Duchač was born on 19 February 1938 in Bad Schlag, today Jablonecké Paseky, near Gablonz an der Neiße (Jablonec nad Nisou) in Czechoslovakia. He was the son of a German Bohemian working-class family and grew up in the Sudetenland. After the Second World War the family was expelled from Czechoslovakia and found a new home in Gotha, in what became East Germany.

After finishing school in 1957 he began studying chemistry and mathematics at the teacher training institute in Mühlhausen but left after a year. He worked in newspaper distribution and then, from 1959 to 1961, as a labourer at the VEB Gummiwerke rubber works in Waltershausen. In 1961 he enrolled at the engineering school for rubber and plastics technology in Fürstenwalde, graduating as a chemical engineer in 1964. Alongside his job he later studied by correspondence at the Dresden and Leuna-Merseburg technical universities, qualifying as a graduate engineer-economist in 1973.

In 1964 Duchač became a shift engineer at the rubber works in Waltershausen, where he worked his way up to works manager by 1986. He joined the East German CDU, one of the bloc parties of the GDR, in 1957. From 1986 to 1989 he was deputy district chairman of the CDU in Gotha and worked on the Gotha district council, responsible for housing.

During the upheaval of autumn 1989 he returned to the rubber works for about half a year to lead it after the management installed by the ruling SED was removed. In October 1989 he became district chairman of the CDU in Gotha, and in December 1989 a member of the executive of the East German CDU. On 11 June 1990 Lothar de Maizière, the last prime minister of the GDR, appointed him government commissioner for the Erfurt district, and in August 1990 he was named spokesman for the state of Thuringia that was about to be re-created. From 3 October 1990 he served as its plenipotentiary, the only one of the five state plenipotentiaries to go straight on to become minister-president.

At the first free Thuringian state election on 14 October 1990 the CDU, with Duchač as its lead candidate, won 45.5 per cent and 44 of the 89 seats. On 8 November 1990 he was elected minister-president of a CDU and FDP coalition. His government had to deal with rising unemployment, the rescue or closure of former state enterprises and the vetting and renewal of the public service. He survived an SPD motion of no confidence in December 1991, but criticism of his leadership and personnel choices, accusations of entanglement with the GDR system and allegations that he had worked with the Ministry for State Security grew, and several ministers resigned. On 23 January 1992 he announced his resignation, saying he could no longer be sure of his parliamentary group's confidence. Bernhard Vogel, a former minister-president of Rhineland-Palatinate, succeeded him in February 1992, and Duchač resigned his seat in the Landtag on 30 November 1992.

From 1993 to 2002 he led foreign offices of the CDU-affiliated Konrad Adenauer Foundation, first in Lisbon, then in St Petersburg and Budapest.

In retirement Duchač lived in Birkenwerder, near Berlin in Brandenburg. He lost his sight after a stroke. Despite his health problems, the Thuringian state chancellery said he followed and commented sharply on political developments in Thuringia until the end of his life. In April 2025 he attended the requiem for his successor Bernhard Vogel. He gave long interviews about the founding years of the Thuringian Landtag that were published in collections edited by Holger Zürch in 2004 and 2006.

Josef Duchač died on Friday 23 October 2026, aged 88, after a long and serious illness. His death was announced by the Thuringian state chancellery on Monday 26 October and reported by MDR, tagesschau.de and the dpa news agency.

Minister-President Mario Voigt said Thuringia had lost a personality who had shaped the building of the state after 1990 with great personal commitment and energy, and that the successful building of Thuringia was inseparable from his courage, perseverance and personal commitment. Voigt offered his condolences to the family. Funeral arrangements had not been announced at the time of reporting.

Duchač is remembered as the man who led Thuringia through its first months as a federal state after reunification, steering the transition from the GDR district administrations of Erfurt, Gera and Suhl to a single democratic state government. His short and turbulent time in office, ended by internal party criticism and questions about his past in the GDR, also reflected the wider difficulty of building new institutions with people who had lived and worked under the old system. The Konrad Adenauer Foundation keeps his 1990 election poster portrait and a short biography in its archive of CDU history.