Horst Grabert

Grabert's father worked as an accountant after serving as a front officer in the First World War. Although Grabert, like his Jewish mother, was baptized as a Protestant in 1939, he had to leave the Steglitz high school in 1942. After an apprenticeship as an architectural draftsman, he was sent to a labor camp in 1944. Without a high school diploma, he was able to study at Technische Universität Berlin from 1946 after a special examination and became a qualified civil engineer in 1952.^[1]

In 1952 Grabert joined the West Berlin Senate Administration and became a government construction trainee at the Senator for Construction and Housing. In 1955 he passed the building assessor exam and subsequently rose from building officer to senior building officer, building director and, in 1963, senate director. From 1969 to 1973 he was Senator for Federal Affairs and at the same time the official representative of Berlin at federal level.^[2]