Ilse Stöbe

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Portrait photo of Ilse Stöbe

Ilse Frieda Gertrud Stöbe (born May 17, 1911 in Berlin , † December 22, 1942 in Berlin-Plötzensee ) was a German journalist who had participated in the resistance against National Socialism since the 1930s .

Life

Ilse Stöbe was the only daughter of the carpenter Max Stöbe and his wife Frieda, née Schumann, widowed Müller. She had a half-brother from her mother's first marriage, Kurt Müller, eight years her senior . She grew up on Mainzer Strasse 1 in Berlin-Lichtenberg . Little information is available about their youth; many of them come from later interrogations of their half-brother who was accused by the National Socialists as a traitor .

After graduating from elementary school, Stöbe attended a commercial school and learned the trade of a stenographer . She was initially employed in Rudolf Mosse's publishing house and from 1931 to 1933 she was secretary to the journalist Theodor Wolff at the Berliner Tageblatt . She got to know Rudolf Herrnstadt from him , to whom she is said to have become engaged, according to her brother. Wolff wrote the novel Die Schwimmerin in the USA in 1937 , in which he described his love of old age for Ilse Stöbe and which he wanted to film.

From 1929 Stöbe belonged to the KPD undercover . From 1931 she allegedly worked for the Soviet military intelligence service GRU like Herrnstadt (see below). Herrnstadt built up an intelligence group "on behalf of the Central Committee " to which, in addition to himself and Stöbe, Gerhard Kegel and his wife Charlotte Vogt, and at times also the later publisher Helmut Kindler and the lawyer Lothar Bolz belonged. Stöbe moved with Herrnstadt to Warsaw in February 1933 , where she was a foreign correspondent for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung until September 1939 and also wrote for other Swiss newspapers. As a camouflage she became a member of the NSDAP and since 1934 cultural advisor of the NSDAP foreign organization in Poland .

According to Helmut Kindler, she stayed in touch with him as her childhood friend. During the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Stöbe met the Swiss publisher Rudolf Huber, who bequeathed a large part of his fortune to her when he died in 1940.

Shortly before the German invasion of Poland , she returned to Berlin from Warsaw and worked in the information department of the Foreign Office . There she met Carl Helfrich , with whom she lived until she was arrested in 1942. According to her will, he was the tenant of her apartment at Ahornallee 48 in Berlin-Charlottenburg .

Gerhard Kegel, who was an employee of the Foreign Office in Berlin from 1935 to 1943, claims to have supported Ilse Stöbe in her secret intelligence work after her return from Poland. She is said to have continued this activity until she was arrested in 1942.

On September 12, 1942, the Gestapo arrested Ilse Stöbe for allegedly espionage for the Soviet Union. On December 14, 1942, she and Rudolf von Scheliha were sentenced to death by the Reich Court Martial because, according to the indictment, she helped Scheliha to reveal state secrets to foreign countries for money . According to a judge, she was said to have confessed in full at the brief hearing, while Scheliha tried to revoke a confession that had been extorted through torture . On December 22nd, Ilse Stöbe was executed in Plötzensee together with Harro Schulze-Boysen , Arvid Harnack , Scheliha and seven others who were members of the " Red Orchestra " .

Stöbes mother was also arrested and the concentration camp deported where she is, "died in 1943". Stöbe's brother Kurt Müller was initially able to evade arrest and continue his resistance activities with the "European Union" resistance group . He was arrested in September 1943 and executed on June 26, 1944.

Uncertain sources regarding alleged GRU activity

Statements about the alleged espionage activity for the GRU come from a Gestapo report about the "Red Orchestra" written around November 1942. Afterwards, a bugged Soviet radio message to Nazi opponents in Berlin named them; Soviet parachutists should have contacted her. The report also referred to her Warsaw contacts with Rudolf Herrnstadt. In a report to the Soviet side in May 1939, he had mentioned an unnamed journalist with the code name "Alta". The Gestapo later called the Herrnstadt district with Stöbe "Gruppe Alta".

This group is said to have informed the Soviet secret service about Adolf Hitler's directive No. 21 of December 18, 1940 in preparation for the "Barbarossa case" , which the latter sent to Stalin on December 29, 1940 . However, Stalin ignored all comparable warnings from his services about Germany's attack on the Soviet Union planned for May / June 1941 as disinformation .

It is not known which other Nazi opponents in Berlin Stöbe actually had contact, what news she passed on to the Soviet Union and what exactly the Gestapo accused her of.

Memorial plaque , Frankfurter Allee 233, in Berlin-Lichtenberg

reception

From July 1st to 5th, 1967, the Soviet state newspaper Pravda published an article about Ilse Stöbe, made up as a sensational factual report, entitled "Ihr Name war Alta", which described her services as a spy for the Soviets. The account relied on Soviet intelligence reports without giving exact sources. In 1969 Stöbe was posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Banner by the Soviet Union as a “scout” . In 1974 the novel The Inner Front by Yuri Korolkow appeared in the Soviet Union about the resistance of German communists, which mentioned Stöbe, but also gave no verifiable sources.

In 1972, Heinz Höhne's book Keyword Director about the “Red Chapel” appeared in the Federal Republic of Germany , whose statements about Ilse Stöbe came almost exclusively from Gestapo reports and questionable information from former Nazi military judges such as Manfred Roeder .

In the 1970s, a municipal vocational school in Rummelsburger Marktstrasse in East Berlin bore the honorary name Ilse Stöbe . After the German reunification in 1990 this school was renamed.

In 1994 an essay by Ulrich Sahm on Ilse Stöbe was published on behalf of the German Resistance Memorial Center . Sahm checked them all and dismissed much of the previous information about Stöbe as unreliable. He assessed the Nazi charges against Stöbe as a Gestapo construct in order to be able to murder the well-known Nazi opponent Scheliha. In addition to the death sentence, he documented for the first time three farewell letters and a will that Ilse Stöbe wrote to Carl Helfrich and her mother in the last days of her life in Gestapo custody.

In 2006 the Russian ambassador to Belgium honored Ilse Stöbe with other “heroes of the Red Orchestra” for their resistance struggle. An expert opinion by the Institute for Contemporary History came to the conclusion that "the prerequisites for a public appreciation of Ilse Stöbe in Germany are given". From a scientific as well as from a political-ethical point of view, the accusation of treason should also be rejected for those resistance activists who cooperated with Germany's opponents of the war. Accordingly, on July 10, 2014, her name was entered on the memorial plaque of the Foreign Office in the house on Werderschen Markt during a memorial hour . She is the first woman on the plaque.

Since November 12, 2015, a memorial stele at Frankfurter Allee 233 in Berlin-Lichtenberg has been commemorating the Stöbe family.

literature

From contemporary witnesses
  • Theodor Wolff : The swimmer: novel from the present. Oprecht, Zurich, 1937, DNB 992955742
  • Gerhard Kegel: In the storms of our century. A German communist about his unusual life. Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-320-00609-6 .
  • Helmut Kindler: A party to say goodbye: the autobiography of a German publisher. Kindler, 2nd edition, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-463-40131-2 .
Biographical and historical presentations
To the historical environment
  • Luise Kraushaar: Berlin communists in the fight against fascism 1936 to 1942: Robert Uhrig and comrades. Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 1980, DNB 820237590 .
  • Gert Rosiejka: The Red Chapel. "Treason" as an anti-fascist resistance. With an introduction by Heinrich Scheel . Results-Verlag, Hamburg 1986, ISBN 3-925622-16-0 .
  • Vladimir Lota: “Альта” против “Барбароссы” ( “Alta” versus “Barbarossa”. ) Молодая гвардия, 2004, ISBN 5-23502726-4 . ( online, Russian )

Web links

Commons : Ilse Stöbe  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Helmut Müller-Enbergs: The case of Rudolf Herrnstadt. Thaw policy before June 17th. Berlin 1991, p. 32.
  2. ↑ Ulrich Sahm: Ilse Stöbe. In: Hans Coppi, Jürgen Danyel, Johannes Tuchel (eds.): The Red Orchestra in the resistance against National Socialism. Berlin 1994, p. 263.
  3. ↑ Ulrich Sahm: Ilse Stöbe. In: Hans Coppi, Jürgen Danyel, Johannes Tuchel (eds.): The Red Orchestra in the resistance against National Socialism. Berlin 1994, pp. 262 and 264.
  4. ↑ Helmut Müller-Enbergs: The case of Rudolf Herrnstadt. Thaw policy before June 17th. Berlin 1991, pp. 31-34
  5. ↑ Helmut Kindler: A party for parting: The autobiography of a German publisher. 1991.
  6. ↑ Ulrich Sahm: Ilse Stöbe. In: Hans Coppi, Jürgen Danyel, Johannes Tuchel (eds.): The Red Orchestra in the resistance against National Socialism. Berlin 1994, p. 262.
  7. ↑ Hans Coppi, Sabine Kebir: Ilse Stöbe: Again in office. A resistance fighter on Wilhelmstrasse. VSA, Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-89965-569-8 , p. 14.
  8. ↑ Ulrich Sahm: Ilse Stöbe. In: Hans Coppi, Jürgen Danyel, Johannes Tuchel (eds.): The Red Orchestra in the resistance against National Socialism. Berlin 1994, pp. 263, 271.
  9. ↑ Gerhard Kegel: In the storms of our century. Berlin 1984; mentioned by Ulrich Sahm: Ilse Stöbe. In: Hans Coppi, Jürgen Danyel, Johannes Tuchel (eds.): The Red Orchestra in the resistance against National Socialism. Berlin 1994, p. 264, p. 274, footnote 20.
  10. ↑ Helmut Müller-Enbergs: The case of Rudolf Herrnstadt. Thaw policy before June 17th. Berlin 1991, p. 70.
  11. ↑ Ulrich Sahm: Ilse Stöbe. In: Hans Coppi, Jürgen Danyel, Johannes Tuchel (eds.): The Red Orchestra in the resistance against National Socialism. Berlin 1994, p. 265f.
  12. ^ Heinrich-Wilhelm Wörmann: Resistance in Charlottenburg. Volume 5 of the SR of the GDW, Berlin 1991 (2nd improved and expanded edition: Berlin 1998), p. 133.
  13. ↑ Helmut Müller-Enbergs: The case of Rudolf Herrnstadt. Thaw policy before June 17th. Berlin 1991, p. 31; Ulrich Sahm: Ilse Stöbe. In: Hans Coppi, Jürgen Danyel, Johannes Tuchel (eds.): The Red Orchestra in the resistance against National Socialism. Berlin 1994, p. 264f. u. 274, footnotes 17 and 23.
  14. ↑ Ulrich Sahm: Ilse Stöbe. In: Hans Coppi, Jürgen Danyel, Johannes Tuchel (eds.): The Red Orchestra in the resistance against National Socialism. Berlin 1994, p. 264 and 274, footnotes 14, 16, 23.
  15. ↑ Helmut Müller-Enbergs: The case of Rudolf Herrnstadt. Thaw policy before June 17th. Berlin 1991, p. 32.
  16. ↑ Lev A. Bezymenski: The Soviet intelligence service and the beginning of the war of 1941. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenskij (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. The controversy surrounding the preventive war thesis. 2nd edition, Darmstadt 2011, pp. 106f.
  17. ↑ Ulrich Sahm: Ilse Stöbe. In: Hans Coppi, Jürgen Danyel, Johannes Tuchel (eds.): The Red Orchestra in the resistance against National Socialism. Berlin 1994, p. 264.
  18. ↑ Rainer Blasius: Hans Coppi / Sabine Kebir: Ilse Stöbe: Back in office: The Foreign Office and Ilse Stöbe. In: faz.net . July 30, 2013, accessed May 12, 2020 . Neues Deutschland , December 23, 1969, p. 4.
  19. ↑ Ulrich Sahm: Ilse Stöbe. In: Hans Coppi, Jürgen Danyel, Johannes Tuchel (eds.): The Red Orchestra in the resistance against National Socialism. Berlin 1994, p. 264.
  20. ↑ Ulrich Sahm: Ilse Stöbe. In: Hans Coppi, Jürgen Danyel, Johannes Tuchel (eds.): The Red Orchestra in the resistance against National Socialism. Berlin 1994, p. 265.
  21. ↑ Elfriede Brüning: A courageous woman: Today the resistance fighter Ilse Stöbe would have been 100 years old. In: young world . May 17, 2011, accessed May 12, 2020 .
  22. ↑ Ulrich Sahm: Ilse Stöbe. In: Hans Coppi, Jürgen Danyel, Johannes Tuchel (eds.): The Red Orchestra in the resistance against National Socialism. Berlin 1994, pp. 262-276.
  23. ↑ Intervention de SEM Vadim Loukov Russian Embassy in Berlin, Ambassadeur de Russie en Belgique, à la conférence commémorative internationale consacrée aux agents secrets - heros de «l'Orchestre rouge». Russian Embassy in Brussels, archived from the original on October 4, 2013 ; accessed on May 12, 2020 (French).
  24. ↑ Elke Scherstjanoi: Ilse Stöbe (1911 - 1942) in the resistance against the "Third Reich". (pdf; 592 kB) In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (VfZ). 62 (2014), Issue 1, September 20, 2013, pp. 139–156 , accessed on May 12, 2020 (full report).
  25. ^ Rainer Blasius : Late honor: Steinmeier's resistance fighter. In: faz.net . July 10, 2014, accessed May 12, 2020 . Late tribute to a resistance fighter. In: Auswaertiges-amt.de. July 10, 2014, archived from the original on July 16, 2014 ; accessed on May 12, 2020 .
  26. ↑ Person of the month May 2016: Ilse Stöbe. In: museum-lichtenberg.de. May 2016, accessed May 12, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Stöbe, Ilse
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stöbe, Ilse Frieda Gertrud (full name); Alto (alias); Alta (alias)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH May 17, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH December 22, 1942
Place of death Berlin-Plötzensee