Helene Berner

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Helene Berner actually Helene Welker (born December 13, 1904 in Berlin ; † December 22, 1992 there ) was a German resistance fighter against National Socialism and a political functionary. She was u. a. Advisor to the Foreign Minister of the GDR , Georg Dertinger , whom she also monitored as an unofficial employee of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) of the GDR.

Life and activity

Helene Welker, daughter of a sculptor and SPD functionary, worked as a maid from 1919 to 1930 after graduating from elementary school and trained in a wholesale book trade. From 1927 she worked as a nurse and orthopedist . In 1923 she joined the Communist Youth Association of Germany (KJVD) and in 1927 the KPD , where she worked for the KPD's intelligence service , the so-called M apparatus, which existed until 1937 . Until 1931 she was used on various occasions in industrial espionage.

From 1931 to 1935 Welker was head of the Orthopedic Gymnastics Institute of the Berlin health insurance funds on Frankfurter Allee. After the transfer of power to the National Socialists and the ban on the KPD, she supported Wilhelm Bahnik's side with the party as a courier in the border apparatus and then worked under the code names Leni and Lore with the Soviet secret service Glawnoje Raswedywatelnoje Uprawlenije (GRU). In June 1935 Welker was threatened with arrest and she emigrated to the Soviet Union via Czechoslovakia . In 1936 she was sentenced to death in absentia in Germany. At the beginning of 1941 Welkner was recorded in the Gestapo's " Special wanted list of the USSR" .

In 1935/36 Welker was employed as an expert in intelligence operations in the General Staff of the Red Army . From April 1936 to May 1937 she worked in an orthopedic clinic in Moscow . In July 1936, she took on Soviet citizenship . From 1937 to 1941 she worked as a language teacher in the General Staff of the Red Army and then became a teacher at a military school in Moscow and later in Stavropol . In 1942/43 she was a student at the Comintern School in Kuschnarenkowo, then completed special training as a parachute agent and became an officer in the Red Army. In 1944 Welker was a teacher in a front school for prisoners of war in the area of ​​the Second Baltic Front and was involved in the preparation of special departments for use in the German hinterland.

After emigrating, Welker / Berner was classified as an enemy of the state by the National Socialist police. In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin - which she mistakenly assumed to be in Great Britain - put her on the special wanted list GB , a list of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus regarded as particularly dangerous or important, which is why they would be in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Islands by the Wehrmacht should be located and arrested by the occupation troops following special commandos of the SS with special priority.

After the end of the Second World War in 1945, Welker, who now called herself Helene Berner and from then on officially used this name, returned to Germany as a member of the Red Army. From May to September 1945 she held courses in the prisoner-of-war camp in Rüdersdorf and was then a lecturer at the School of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) in Königs Wusterhausen until April 1948 , where she was responsible for training cadres of the bloc parties . In 1949 she was demobilized and stopped working for the Soviet secret service and the Red Army.

After the founding of the GDR, Berner first became a functionary of the Society for German-Soviet Friendship (DSF) and was then head of the training department in the GDR Foreign Ministry until 1959 . In addition, in 1952/53 she was the personal assistant to the then Foreign Minister of the GDR, Georg Dertinger , whom she monitored as a secret employee of the GDR's state security intelligence service.

From 1959 until her retirement in 1968, Berner was the director of the DSF Central House in the Palais am Festungsgraben in East Berlin. In 1990 Bern became a PDS member. She died in Berlin in 1992.

Awards

Works

  • Helene Berner: With the Soviet Army to Berlin . Under the sign of the red star. Berlin 1974.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Report on Leni Berner in the Volksstimme of August 19, 1985
  2. ^ Entry on Welker / Berner on the special wanted site GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .
  3. ^ Peter Joachim Lapp, Georg Dertinger: Journalist - Foreign Minister - Public Enemy , Verlag Herder Freiburg im Breisgau 2005
  4. ↑ Berliner Zeitung of May 8, 1970
personal data
SURNAME Berner, Helene
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Welker, Helene (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German resistance fighter against National Socialism, advisor to the Foreign Minister of the GDR
DATE OF BIRTH December 13, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH 22nd December 1992
Place of death Berlin