Grete Wilde

Grete Wilde (born May 12, 1904 in Berlin , † around 1943 in the Soviet Union ) was a German communist who fell victim to the Stalinist purges .

In 1921 Wilde became a member of the KPD , and in autumn 1923 she became chairwoman of the Communist Youth Association in Berlin-Brandenburg. In 1927 she traveled to the Soviet Union, until 1930 she was a student at the International Lenin School in Moscow, then an instructor in the cadre department of the Communist International (KI). On behalf of Wilhelm Knorin, she worked as an instructor for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Austria in Vienna in 1931 , and later with the same task in Turkey. In Ankara she befriended the famous poet Nâzım Hikmet and his son. She was arrested and sentenced in December 1932 to four years in prison for "communist activities".

After an amnesty she was able to return to the Soviet Union. Under the party name Erna Mertens , she worked in the KI management department from 1935. In Moscow she lived with the Turkish representative at the Executive Committee of the KI (EKKI) Resat Fuat Baraner (1900–1968). Their son Klaus was born on July 19, 1935 in Moscow.

Grete Wilde and Georg Brückmann (also an adviser in the management department) were closely involved in the Stalinist party purges. Wilde himself got caught in the purges in the summer of 1937. She was accused of »participating in the factional struggle of the Ruth Fischer Maslow Group against the party leadership of the KPD in 1923, connection with anti-party and anti-Soviet elements such as Schatzkin , Lominadze , Vujovic , unprincipled fight against the leadership of the Lenin School in 1928, Conducting a group fight against the party leadership of the KPÖ in 1931 and incriminating a Turkish party member before the Turkish police. "

On October 5, 1937, she was arrested by the NKVD in Moscow and sentenced to eight years in a camp by a special tribunal "for membership in the right-wing anti-Comintern organization in the EKKI apparatus". She was deported to the Gulag in Karaganda , where she probably died in 1943/44.

literature

• Biographical information from the Handbook of the German Communists