Anna Leibbrand

Anna Leibbrand (born May 2, 1902 , † July 24, 1972 ) was a German writer and left-wing political activist.

In 1933 she fled Germany from the Nazi regime , but was arrested twenty years later after her return to Germany (GDR) in 1953 and imprisoned for several years in connection with the espionage trials triggered by the arrest of Noel Field .

Name variants

Anna Leibrand was born Anna Wiedemann , was married three times, two marriages were divorced. She wrote books under two pseudonyms . It can therefore appear in the sources under one of the following names:

• Anna Wiedemann
• Anna Leibbrand
• Anna Schlotterbeck
• Anna von Fischer ; Anna Josephine Fischer as the author of "Behind the Seven Mountains" (1945)
• Anna Schlotterbeck

Life

Anna Wiedemann was born in Munich, where her father worked as a printer and she attended elementary school. She then moved to the Royal Württemberg Higher Mechanical Engineering School in Esslingen, which she left in 1917 with a degree as a technical draftsman. She then took on a job as a graphic designer and typist at Robert Bosch GmbH in Stuttgart-Feuerbach .

In 1918, the year of her sixteenth birthday, she was accepted into the Socialist Youth by Clara Zetkin . After the war she took part in the demonstrations of the Spartakusbund in Stuttgart , which took place between November 1918 and January 1919. In 1924 she became a member of the Communist Party of Germany KPD, which was founded in 1919, and a member of the party's youth leadership, the KJVD . She became a member of the district management in Königsberg, Danzig, Halle u. Berlin.

In 1923 she married Robert Leibbrand , a leading party official from Stuttgart. Their son Walter was born in 1924. From 1927 the family lived in Moscow , where Anna Leibrand worked as a stenographer for the Comintern until 1929 . In 1929 the family returned to Berlin, and Anna Leibbrand became head of the party women's department for the Berlin-Brandenburg district. She also worked as an editor for the party newspaper "Die Arbeiterin". Until 1933 she was a member of the district council of Berlin-Pankow.

emigration

After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Anna and Robert Leibbrand initially continued their - now illegal - party work. On March 24, 1933, Robert Leibbrand was arrested. He spent most of the twelve years of Nazi rule in prisons and concentration camps . Anna Leibrand herself continued her own party work until July 1933. In September 1933 she emigrated to Switzerland , where she initially worked as a domestic servant. She joined the Communist Party of Switzerland (KPS) and remained a member until 1948. After a while she got a job with the doctor Hans von Fischer in Göschenen . She describes her personal experiences and impressions in Göschenen in the novel Behind the Seven Mountains , with which she took part in a 1945 novel competition organized by the Zurich Book Guild.

From 1936 she lived in Zurich. Anna and Robert Leibbrand's marriage was divorced in 1938. She married Hans von Fischer in 1939, which gave her Swiss citizenship. During this time she and her husband founded the Centrale Sanitaire Suisse in Zurich , a medical aid organization that was originally supposed to provide medical support to fighters in the Spanish civil war . At the time, she was also working illegally for the Italian Communist Party. The neutrality of Switzerland during the Second World War enabled it to work with political and medical aid organizations in various countries during and immediately after the war.

After the end of the war in 1945 she stayed in Switzerland for another three years on the instructions of Franz Dahlem , then head of the Western Commission of the Central Committee of the KPD. Her contacts in the 1940s also included Noel Field , a senior member of the Unitarian Service Committee , a disaster and refugee relief organization with close ties to the United States. Already in 1945/46 she warned the party leadership of the KPD (Grete Keilson, Franz Dahlem) against Noel Field and Leo Bauer as alleged representatives of the US security service.

Return to Germany

In October 1948 she returned to Germany and settled in Dresden with her childhood friend Friedrich Schlotterbeck , with whom she had been together since he fled to Switzerland. She joined the SED in 1949 . After a short period of unemployment, she worked from 1949 to 1951 as a correspondent for the Daily Rundschau , a newspaper produced by the Red Army for the GDR. She also worked with the Soviet press office and, in 1950, briefly took part in a political course at the regional party academy.

In February 1951, after an intervention by the State Party Control Commission for Saxony, she and her husband were expelled from the SED on suspicion of espionage. They were asked to demonstrate their loyalty to the state through “excellent work” in the notorious uranium mines of SDAG Wismut . At the end of 1951 they moved into an apartment in Raschau in the Ore Mountains, where Friedrich Schlotterbeck worked underground in the uranium mining of Wismut.

Arrest and conviction

On February 15, 1953, the couple, who had married in March 1951, were arrested for "criminal relations with the American spy Noel Field ". It was Noel Field, a committed communist who had apparently made himself available to various security services. Field had admitted spying under torture, whereupon a number of show trials were carried out in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries against people who had contact with Field.

In fact, in 1941 she had given Field addresses of emigrants of various nationalities. During their time in Switzerland, the Schlotterbecks were friends with Herta Jurr-Tempi, who may have been a Gestapo agent. After her arrest, the stepdaughter, the child of Friedrich Schlotterbeck's murdered sister Gertrud Lutz , was taken to a children's home, while the Schlotterbecks were imprisoned one after the other by the Ministry for State Security in Chemnitz in the Villa Esche , and from autumn 1951 in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen . A little more than a year after her arrest, she was on trial in Rostock on April 27, 1954 and was sentenced to four years imprisonment for "crimes under Article 6 of the East German Constitution in connection with a criminal offense led to Control Council Directive 38". In an appeal process, the sentence was reduced to 3 years.

Release from prison and writing

After her release from prison on February 15, 1956, the usual, unpublished, rehabilitation and the silent re-admission into the SED followed. The punishment was removed from the official protocol in 1957.

With the help of Martin Hellberg, the couple settled in Groß Glienicke near Potsdam . Together they wrote several radio plays, including Die Memoiren der Frau Viktoria (1962), and became friends with fellow writers Gerhard and Christa Wolf . In 1968 Anna Schlotterbeck created a manuscript entitled Hohenschönhausen, Cell 51 , which was about her experiences with imprisonment in the GDR. In 1986 the manuscript was published under the title The Forbidden Hope. From the life of a communist published in the West, Chaim Noll wrote the preface .

Anna Schlotterbeck died on July 24, 1972, her grave is in the cemetery in Groß-Glienicke.

Grave of Anna and Friedrich Schlotterbeck

credentials

1. ↑ Publications by authors with this name - Schlotterbeck, Anna . In: Catalog of the German National Library . German National Library, Frankfurt am Main. Retrieved April 12, 2015.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Leibbrand, Anna * 2.5.1902, † 24.7.1972 ( German ) Federal Foundation for the Processing of the SED Dictatorship: Biographical Databases. Retrieved April 12, 2015.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Schlotterbeck, Anna geb. Wiedmann, Gesch. V. Fischer * 2.5.1902, † July 24th, 1972 writer, victim of internal SED repression ( German ) Federal Foundation for the Processing of the SED Dictatorship: Biographical Databases. Retrieved April 12, 2015.
4. ↑ Anna Josephine Fischer: Behind the seven mountains . Gutenberg Book Guild , Zurich , 1945.
5. ↑ ^{a b} Leibbrand, Robert * 1.5.1901, † 25.1.1963 ( German ) Federal Foundation for the Processing of the SED Dictatorship: Biographical Databases. Retrieved April 12, 2015.
6. ↑ Andrea Weibel: Centrale sanitaire suisse (CSS) . Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse, Berne. July 12, 2005. Retrieved April 12, 2015.
7. ↑ The Forbidden Hope. From the life of a communist
8. ↑ "Crime according to Article 6 of the GDR in connection with an offense against Control Council Directive 38"

literature

• Anna Josephine Fischer: Behind the seven mountains. Gutenberg Book Guild, Zurich 1945.
• Anna Schlotterbeck the 9th November from Die Zeit wears a red star Aufbau Verlag Berlin 1958.
• Andrea Weibel: Centrale sanitaire suisse (CSS). Historical Lexicon of Switzerland, Bern. Published April 12, 2015. http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/
• Anna Schlotterbeck; Friedrich Schlotterbeck: The memoirs of Mrs. Viktoria. 1962, HörDat. p. April 3, 2015.
• Anna Schlotterbeck; Hans Noll (preface): The forbidden hope. From the life of a communist. Facta Oblita Verlag, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-926827-31-9 (written 1968).
• Christa Wolf : One day a year. 1960-2000. Luchterhand, Munich 2003; Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-46007-8 .
• Bernd-Rainer Barth and Werner Schweizer The Noel Field case p. 186 Basis Druck, Berlin 2005.
• In custody at the State Security: The Berlin-Hohenschönhausen remand prison 1951–1989, pp. 135-137 (analyzes and documents of the BStU. Volume 44) by Julia Spohr
• Friedrich Schlotterbeck; The darker the night, the brighter the stars shine. Memories of a German worker 1933–1945 Walter Verlag 1986. Friedrich Schlotterbeck, Christa Wolf, Werner Stiefele ISBN 978-3-925440-10-6

Radio plays

• 1958: Anna and Friedrich Schlotterbeck: SMS Prinzregent Luitpold . Director: Theodor Popp (Broadcasting of the GDR)
• 1959: Anna and Friedrich Schlotterbeck: Stormy days . Director: Helmut Hellstorff (Broadcasting of the GDR)

Web links

• Federal Foundation for Work-Up - Schlotterbeck, Anna, short biography
• Federal Foundation for Work-Up - Leibbrand, Anna, short biography
• GDR biographies - Anna Schlotterbeck