Herta Haas

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Herta Haas (born March 29, 1914 in Slovenska Bistrica , † March 5, 2010 in Belgrade ) was a Slovenian German member of the Yugoslav partisans and the second wife of the partisan leader and president of socialist Yugoslavia , Josip Broz Tito .

biography

Herta Haas (second from left) 1943

Haas was born in 1914 in Slovenska Bistrica, Slovenia, which at that time belonged to Austria-Hungary . While still at school, she joined revolutionary workers' movements and took over messenger services between Yugoslavia and France .

Haas first met Tito in Paris in 1937, a year after he separated from his first wife, Russian Pelagija "Polka" Belousova. In 1940 they met again in Istanbul, where Haas was supposed to deliver a passport to Tito, who was returning from a stay in Moscow . The couple married in the same year and the couple returned to Yugoslavia under cover names. They lived in Zagreb until the Wehrmacht invasion , where the pregnant Haas was left alone when Tito moved to Belgrade.

In May 1941 they had their only child, Mišo Broz , who was Croatian ambassador to Indonesia from 2004 to 2009. Partisan supporters hid her and her son from the National Socialist authorities and their allies , but they were found and captured by them. In 1943 they were released through an exchange of prisoners between the National Socialists and the partisans in exchange for a German officer.

When Haas was released in 1943, her husband Tito had an affair with his secretary Davorjanka Paunović (alias “Zdenka”). Haas and Tito separated in the same year during the second meeting of the "Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia" in Jajce after Haas is said to have caught her husband and Paunović in flagranti . Haas then spent the remainder of World War II separated from Tito in Slovenia.

Tito and Haas are said to have met only once after the end of the Second World War, during their visit to the Belgrade presidential seat. After the war she worked in government institutions in socialist Yugoslavia. She remarried, had two daughters and lived a life apart from the public interest.

Herta Haas died shortly before her 96th birthday on March 5, 2010 in Belgrade.

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d Tito's ex wife Hertha Hass dies . In: Monsters and Critics , March 9, 2010. Retrieved March 24, 2010.  
  2. a b c d e f g h i j k l m Tito's second wife dies at 96 . In: Xinhua , March 10, 2010. Archived from the original on June 9, 2011. Retrieved March 24, 2010.  
  3. Titova udovica daleko od očiju javnosti . In: Blic.rs . December 28, 2008. Archived from the original on December 14, 2009. Retrieved March 10, 2010.