Emmi Handke

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Emmi (Emmy) Handke (née Christoph ) (born September 30, 1902 in Breslau ; † January 17, 1994 in Berlin ) was a German communist and long-time Secretary General of the Ravensbrück International Camp Committee and a member of the People's Chamber .

Life

Emmi Handke, from a working-class family, grew up as an orphan with eight siblings with her aunts in Dresden . After attending elementary school and a business school she attended from 1918 to 1920 trained as a clerk and then took a office work on.

She became a member of the KJVD in 1922 and was briefly arrested for the first time a little later. In 1925 she became a member of the KPD and she got a job as an employee of the Central Committee of the KPD. In 1927, she worked as part of a delegation trip to the Soviet Union , where she met her first husband, Karl Thoma . After the wedding, the now married Emmi Thoma moved to her husband in Berlin in 1928. Her husband was arrested on February 27, 1933 after the Reichstag fire . Emmi Thoma himself was arrested in 1934 for illegal political activity. Emmi Thoma never saw her husband again, who joined the interbrigades in Spain after his release .

After six years of solitary confinement in Jauer prison , she was deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1941. There the weakened woman was smuggled into the infirmary to work with the help of fellow inmates. In the late spring of 1942 Emmy Thoma was deported to Auschwitz , where she again worked as a nurse in the infirmary. At the suggestion of a superintendent , Emmi Thoma was released from the concentration camp together with four other prisoners by Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler . However, the camp doctor Baron von Bodmann hired her as a maid in his household. Thoma had to do this job for over two years. After the liberation , Emmi Thoma returned to Berlin. There she got a job as an employee of the party executive of the KPD, the later Central Committee of the SED . She got involved in the resistance sector and looked for prisoners who were returning from the camps and prisons and got them to write down their experiences. While she was working, Thoma met Georg Handke again, with whom she had been arrested in 1934, and married him in 1947. In 1956 Emmi Handke stopped working for the Central Committee of the SED and devoted herself to her honorary posts.

As an employee of the Central Committee of the KPD, she held no political offices. In 1947 she was elected the first spokeswoman for the Ravensbrück camp community. One year later she became a member of the secretariat of the DFD district association in Berlin. She also sat on the supervisory board of the Berlin consumer cooperatives for a while . In 1955 Emmi Handke was elected Vice President of the Ravensbrück International Camp Committee. In 1963 she was elected General Secretary of the camp committee. Emmi Handke held this position until 1993. The prominent member was also not hidden from the DFD. In 1958 Emmi Handke ran for the Volkskammer elections as a candidate for the DFD. From then on she represented the mass organization, initially as a Berlin representative, until 1986 in the parliament of the GDR. At times, her husband Georg Handke was also a member of the People's Chamber. Between 1964 and 1969, Emmi Handke was also a member of the DFD national board.

Awards

literature

personal data
SURNAME Handke, Emmi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Thoma, Emmi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD, DFD), MdV, General Secretary of the International Camp Committee Ravensbrück
DATE OF BIRTH September 30, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Wroclaw
DATE OF DEATH 17th January 1994
Place of death Berlin