Die ökonomische Elite der DDR im Datenbestand des Teilprojektes A1 des SFB 580: Leitungspersonal der volkseigenen Industrie im Zentralen Kaderdatenspeicher

The Zentraler Kaderdatenspeicher (ZKDS, Central Cadre Database) of the Council of Ministers of the GDR contains the data of approx. 700.000 functionaries from different parts of that late socialist society, of whom the management elite from state owned enterprises of the highly industrialized GDR is a large part of. A variety of variables allows discriminating scholarly access to the collective biography of the managers and the complex recruitment processes underlying it. The paper delivers a short description of the core data, discusses the problem of selecting subpopulations, and compares figures of important categories to statistic sources. Additionally, a special category of GDR personnel is examined which can be researched into by detecting it from the ZKDS entries on social background, namely persons hailing from private entrepreneur's families — the children of the abolished old capitalist class.