Rainer Ortleb  Rainer Ortleb (born Gera 5 June 1944) is German academic and politician. From October 1990 he served under Helmut Kohl as a minister without portfolio in Germany's first post-reunification government. In the next government, between 1991 and 1994, he served as Minister of Education and Science. Ortleb was born directly after the war in the eastern part of Thuringia, then a part of the Soviet occupation zone in what had till recently been central southern Germany. During his early years the zone became the newly created German Democratic Republic. Ortleb successfully completed his schooling in 1962 and undertook military service with the National People's Army until 1964, then signing up as an . He studied Mathematics at Dresden, obtaining his first degree in 1963 and his doctorate in 1971. In 1977 he became a senior research assistant, still at the Dresden University of Technology. Here, for several years, he also headed up an "Army Reserve Collective", in the end reaching the rank of lieutenant. Further academic promotion (Habilitation) to the status of "Dr.-Ing. (engineering)" followed in 1983, on the basis of a paper entitled ""Baustein-Terminal in Dialogsystemen"", after which his academic work focused on Information Systems. He moved north in 1984, to Rostock University where he lectured on information systems processing, was appointed an associate professor in 1989, and where he worked from 1992 till 1998 as Professor for Technical Systems Applications Software. Ortleb joined the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany (LDPD) in 1968. The East German LDPD was one of five constituent Bloc parties controlled by the country's ruling SED party through a political structure called the National Front. He subsequently held various positions within the LDPD, joining the regional party secretariat for Dresden in 1976. His political career started moving to Rostock before his academic career, and in 1978 he was elected LDPD regional chairman for the Rostock region. In 1982, however, he was additionally appointed chairman of the LDPD's district executive for the party in Dresden-south. At the LDPD party conference at Weimar on 3 March 1977, he appeared, not for the last time at a party conference, in his army uniform and gave a rousing speech in praise of national defense. He spoke with eloquence and some passion: "My first argument is visible to you all, this uniform ... the result, the exercise in the art of war, is forced on us daily by the actions of the imperialists" Western observers subsequently identified more than a trace of irony in his performance.