Elsa Noffke

Elsa Noffke born Elsa Jandera (born June 29, 1905 in Rosenthal , † November 6, 1943 in Ravensbrück ) was a German publisher and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Elsa Noffke grew up in Austria-Hungary . In 1922 she became a member of the CCP . From 1926 to 1928 she worked as a secretary in the Comintern Publishing House in Moscow and then until 1932 in the administration of the KPC. From April 1932 she was a member of the KPD , for which she worked as a consultant in the Society of Friends of the Soviet Union in Berlin. Because of the danger posed by the National Socialist terror in Berlin, she emigrated to the Netherlands in March 1933 , where she continued her work for the Friendship Society. In 1934 and 1935 she worked again as a publishing clerk, first in a publishing house in Leningrad and then at the publishing cooperative of foreign workers in Moscow, where she met the editor Ernst Noffke (1903–1973), whom she married in 1935.

After the attack by the Wehrmacht on the Soviet Union in August 1941, she attended the Comintern School from August 1941, after which the training was continued by the GRU military intelligence service , where she was trained as a parachutist and radio operator. In October 1942, she drove to England in a ship convoy to reach her mission from there. On February 24, 1943, she and Georg Tietze parachuted from an RAF plane near Freiburg im Breisgau. At the end of April 1943, she was arrested by the Gestapo . The Red Chapel Special Commission tried to win her as a double agent in order to send her to Switzerland as a contact and decoy . However, this plan was abandoned and she was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp , where she was tortured and shot by the SS.

Her sister Albine Jandera was married to the head of the publishing department of the Executive Committee of the Comintern Michail Kreps (1895-1937), who was arrested on July 27, 1937 as a result of the Stalinist paranoia and shot on October 27, 1937.

literature

• Hans Coppi : The “Red Orchestra” in the field of tension between resistance and intelligence work. The Trepper Report from June 1943 (PDF; 1.5 MB). In: "Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte", No. 3/1996, p. 458. (footnote 79)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Robert Melvin Spector: World without Civilization: Mass Murder and the Holocaust , Volume 1. University Press of America, 2005, ISBN 0761829636 , p. 384.
2. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from July 14, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.