Bertha Thalheimer

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Bertha Thalheimer

Bertha Thalheimer (also Berta Thalheimer ; born March 17, 1883 in Affaltrach ; † April 23, 1959 in Stuttgart ) was a communist politician.

Life

origin

Bertha Thalheimer was born in Affaltrach as the daughter of a socialist Jewish merchant family. The family moved to Winnenden in 1892 and to Cannstatt in 1899 , where Bertha graduated from school in 1901. Then she studied economics in Berlin .

Pre-war social democracy and Spartacus group

Together with her one year younger brother August Thalheimer , she came into contact early on with well-known personalities of the SPD left such as Clara Zetkin , Franz Mehring , Friedrich Westmeyer and Rosa Luxemburg and in 1910 she joined the SPD , where she edited for her brother's Freie Göppinger Volkszeitung and Zetkins Equality wrote, and she was also a member of the Württemberg party executive.

Belonging to the left wing of the party, Berta Thalheimer began in 1914 after the outbreak of war, together with her brother, Westmeyer and Zetkin, to collect the opponents of the truce policy within the Württemberg SPD and joined the International Group around Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, where she was responsible for international contacts . She represented the group in September 1915 at the conference in Zimmerwald , in April 1916 at the conference in Kiental and in the same month at the international socialist youth conference organized by Willi Munzenberg . Together with Friedrich Westmeyer, she led the organizational preparatory work for the founding conference of the “International Group”. She was also present on January 1, 1916 at the meeting in Berlin, where the guiding principles of the future "Spartacus Group" were adopted. Until she moved to Berlin, she was actively involved in the anti-war demonstrations in Stuttgart. In March 1917 Bertha Thalheimer was arrested for her anti-war activities (work as secretary to Leo Jogiches , the organizer of the Spartakusbund) and sentenced in October 1917 to two years imprisonment for attempted high treason. Her sister-in-law, Klara Thalheimer, who was also arrested, was acquitted.

In KPD and KPO

Liberated from prison by the November Revolution in 1918 , she was a founding member of the KPD , where she mainly devoted herself to women's work and in 1925 was a co-founder of the Red Women's and Girls' Association (RFMB). Belonging to the party-internal opposition to the Stalinization course of the Thälmann leadership around her brother as well as Heinrich Brandler and Paul Frölich , she was expelled from the KPD in early 1929 and joined the Communist Party Opposition (KPO), for which she was a speaker and journalist, among others . a. was active for the KPO newspapers Arbeiterpolitik and the Stuttgarter Arbeiter-Tribüne .

Nazi and post-war period

After 1933 Bertha Thalheimer stayed in Stuttgart, her “Aryan” husband, whom she married in 1920, divorced her, but provided her with material support. In 1941 she was forced to move to a Jewish house, from where she was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943; she was liberated on May 5, 1945. Bertha Thalheimer immediately returned to Stuttgart, where she briefly rejoined the KPD, and then in 1946 joined the KPO's successor organization, the Workers' Policy Group . Until her brother's death in 1948, she tried hard - but in vain - to obtain a return permit for him from the Allied authorities. After Heinrich Brandler's return from exile in 1949, she took him in temporarily. From 1952 until her death, Bertha Thalheimer, whose health was badly damaged by the consequences of the concentration camp imprisonment, was responsible for the journal Arbeiterpolitik .

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Thalheimer, Bertha
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Thalheimer, Berta (different spelling)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist politician
DATE OF BIRTH March 17, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Affaltrach
DATE OF DEATH April 23, 1959
Place of death Stuttgart