Berta Zimmermann

Berta Zimmermann (born September 27, 1902 in Zurich ; † December 2, 1937 in Moscow ) was a Swiss Comintern employee.

Born into the family of a horticultural architect, Zimmermann graduated from the commercial college in Zurich in 1921 with a commercial diploma and worked as a secretary in a law firm until 1923. In 1924 she married the Swiss communist , co-founder of the Comintern and friend of Lenin , Fritz Platten . In March 1924 she moved to the Soviet Union with a group of Swiss emigrants and worked as an accountant in the agricultural cooperative near the village of Novaya Lawa in what is now the Ulyanovsk Oblast, which is run by Swiss communists around Platten .

Just a few months later, she moved to Moscow and began to work as a secretary and translator in the Executive Committee of the Communist International - first in the information department, from 1929 in the organization department, from 1931 finally in the secret Comintern liaison service, the Otdel meschdunarodnych swjasei (OMS) . As a Comintern courier, she carried out several secret missions in Western Europe, including in Prague and Paris . She then worked as the secretary of Ossip Pyatnizki and Alexander Abramow-Mirow , and from 1935 she was head of the OMS courier department.

Zimmermann was non-party throughout his life; she was refused admission to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1924. On June 4, 1937, she was arrested by the NKVD in Moscow , a few days after the arrest of her superior Abramov-Mirov. Presumably under torture, she confessed to belonging to a "Trotskyist espionage organization" within the Comintern and also to work for the German and British secret services. In court, she recanted her "confession" was still on December 2, 1937 sentenced to death and presumably the same day shot . Her husband, Fritz Platten, was arrested in 1938, sentenced to camp imprisonment and shot in the camp in 1942.

Platten and Zimmermann were rehabilitated in May 1956 as part of the de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union . A copy of Berta Zimmermann's Comintern personnel file is in the Swiss Social Archives .

literature

• Michael Buckmiller , Klaus Meschkat (ed.): Biographical manual for the history of the Communist International. A German-Russian research project. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2007. ISBN 978-3-05-004158-2 , accompanying CD-ROM, entry "Platten, geb. Zimmermann, Berta".
• Markus Bürgi: Platten, Fritz. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Peter Huber : Carpenter Berta. In: Le Maitron. Dictionnaire biographique ( online version ).
• Peter Huber: Stalin's shadow in Switzerland. Swiss communists in Moscow: defenders and prisoners of the Comintern. Chronos, Zurich 1994, ISBN 3-905311-29-1 .
• Barbara Schneider: Swiss emigrants in the Soviet Union. The experiences of the Swiss Communards in revolutionary Russia (1924–1930). Schaffhauser AZ, Schaffhausen 1985. ISBN 3-908609-01-1 .

Web links

• Bed bugs and fleas. In: Der Spiegel . 5th September 1994.
• Entry on Berta Zimmermann in the memorial database Otkrytyj spisok (Russian)
• Charges against Zimmermann from the NKVD investigation file (Russian)
• Archive holdings "Swiss Communists" of the Swiss Social Archives with information on Berta Zimmermann's Comintern personnel file