Else Marie Fugger

Else Marie Fugger , née Else Marie Vierling (born February 9, 1903 in Leipzig ; † May 13, 1982 in Bernau near Berlin ) was a German resistance fighter against National Socialism , personal secretary of Walter Ulbricht and functionary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Life

Fugger, daughter of a bricklayer, worked as a housemaid after elementary school and learned the trade of clerk. Until 1925 she worked in this position at Jaeger & Co in Leipzig. In 1918 she became a member of the Central Association of Employees (ZdA), in 1920 of the Friends of Nature International (NFI) and in 1924 of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

In 1925 Fugger began to work full-time for the KPD. Until 1927 she was a shorthand typist for the KPD district leadership in West Saxony, then until 1932 she was the editorial secretary of the KPD newspaper Süddeutsche Arbeiterzeitung . In 1929 she married the KPD functionary Karl Fugger . In 1932/33 Fugger worked as a typist and accountant for the German sales company for Russian oil products (Derop) . In 1933 she was an employee of the information service of the Inprekor and cashier and stenographer at the Reichsleitung der Rote Hilfe Deutschlands (RHD).

From September 1934 Fugger worked for the RHD in Paris and in the Western European Office of International Red Aid (IRH). From 1937, she lived illegally in Paris under the name Marie-Pauline Felten . After the outbreak of the Second World War , Fugger refused in September 1939 the decision of the KPD emigration management to report to the French authorities. She continued to look after internees and, together with Käthe Dahlem, managed the KPD's illegal money deposit in France .

In 1941 Fugger became a member of the KPD leadership in Germany-occupied France. She supported the Resistance as a courier and tried to persuade German soldiers to desert. In November 1943, she was arrested for “communist propaganda and degradation of the military” and interned in the Fresnes Wehrmacht prison near Paris. In 1944/45 she was held in the Ravensbrück concentration camp and evacuated to Sweden by the Red Cross in April 1945 .

After the end of the war, Fugger returned to Germany in February 1946 and became the personal secretary of Walter Ulbricht, who later ruled the GDR. From 1947 to 1949 she was a press officer for western media in the advertising-press-broadcasting department at the central secretariat of the SED. In 1950/51 she attended a state party school of the SED and then became an instructor in the agitation department of the Central Committee (ZK) of the SED . From 1952 to 1955 she worked in the same position in the Berlin regional leadership of the SED.

From 1954 Fugger was a librarian at the trade union college "Fritz Heckert" of the Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB), where she was a clerk at the Institute for Researching the Situation of Workers in West Germany. In 1959 she retired, but occasionally continued to look after foreign state guests.

Honors

• 1966 Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze (GDR)
• 1978 Patriotic Order of Merit in Silver (GDR)

literature

• Bernd-Rainer Barth :  Else Marie Fugger . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Dora Schaul : Resistance , Berlin 1973.
• Karlheinz Pech : On the side of the Resistance , Berlin 1974.
• Sigrid Jakubeit: Else Marie Fugger , In: Kreuzweg Ravensbrück , Leipzig 1987.
• Ulla Plener (Ed.): Women from Germany in the French Resistance , Berlin 2006.