Ina Ender

Ina Ender born as Ina Schreier (* July 9, 1917 in today's Berlin-Kreuzberg as Ina Schreier; † March 27, 2008 in Lehnitz near Berlin) was a German resistance fighter , "demonstration lady" and one of the first German criminal police officers.

Life

Ender was the daughter of the trained sculptor Erich Schreier and the tailor Margarete Hätzel. Her father was a co-founder of the Spartakusbund and the KPD . He worked as an employee in the Berlin-Kreuzberg district office, where he was the works council chairman until 1933 and a well-known opponent of National Socialism.

From 1923 to 1927 Ina Ender attended the Kreuzberg elementary school and then the Minna-Cauer School in Berlin-Neukölln . She got involved in the student council early on and in 1931 came into contact with the young communists through a family friend. As the first girl she attended the reform school Scharfenberg . Through her friendship with Hans Lautenschläger and Hans Coppi , in 1932, when she was 15, she joined the Communist Youth Association, which was already illegal , and took part in the political actions of her friends against the Nazi regime .

After the Hitler government came to power on January 30, 1933, her father was dismissed from the district office and abused by the SA during house searches . Despite his very good scholastic performance, Ender's vacancy at the boarding school was canceled. Since her parents could not pay the school fees, she had to leave school without a qualification and was unable to get an apprenticeship due to a lack of training places. Her mother trained her as a tailor and she managed to find a place at the vocational school for tailors. However, her training was not recognized because her mother was not authorized to train apprentices. For the time being, mother and daughter were able to live on private jobs. From 1935 Ender had to work in a piecework yarn opening and from 1936 she found a job as a ready-to-wear seamstress in a ladies' tailor's shop.

In the mid-1930s, Hanns Hubmann, one of the “star photographers of Nazi celebrities”, became aware of her because, as a trained seamstress and “long-legged beauty”, she had all the prerequisites for a career as a photo model. Since her face soon graced the magazines, she got access to the "upper circles", which she used to collect information for her resistance activities. On September 14, 1936, she married Hans Lautenschläger.

She described her work as a "demonstration lady" as follows:

“ Annemarie Heise's salon was a special kind of experience. A group of customers was served here who did not belong to me: noble society, Eva Braun , the wife of Goebbels , film actresses like Zarah Leander , Marika Rökk ... Through this work in Salon, of course, I came into possession of information that was otherwise not so easily obtained. “One of the pieces of information she received in the fashion salon was one from Eva Braun about the planned date for the conquest of Moscow. There were also indications of front line movements and targets when the wives of the highest military chatted about upcoming trips and transfers.

The "Model" jobs in many European cities gave her the opportunity to travel legally. At the end of the 1930s, her resistance group, to which her friend Oda Schottmüller also belonged, joined the Berlin groups of the Red Orchestra led by Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack . Leopold Trepper wrote in his memoirs: “... one of the connections between Berlin and Brussels was established by the very beautiful Ina Ender, a mannequin in the same salon where Eva Braun (Hitler's lover) and the wives of the National Socialist dignitaries had their toilets made . "

Ina Ender was arrested by the Gestapo in September 1942 . Her courier activity went undetected. In July 1943 she was sentenced by the Reich Court Martial to a six-year prison term for aiding in dismantling military strength (handing out leaflets) .

After she was released from prison, she was immediately appointed deputy mayor of Brand-Erbisdorf in May 1945 and worked there until the summer of 1946. After her mother and son Axel had been resettled from Poland, she wanted to return to Berlin. For the time being, however, she was deployed in the newly established branch of the People's Police to protect freight transport in Niedersedlitz near Dresden and moved there with her mother and son. In 1947 she was transferred to the Grossenhain District Police Department . There she initially worked in administration and a few months later as head of the office. In 1949 she moved to the criminal police as chief commissioner of the state authority of the people's police in Dresden. She was responsible for investigating sabotage and Nazi crimes. In May 1950, at her own request, she was transferred to the head office of the People's Police in Berlin. Dismissed in October 1950 for violating the service regulations, she had to look for a new job as head of the trade organization (HO) in the area of ​​industrial goods and in 1953 became head of the department. When her husband Hans Lautenschläger returned to Berlin from Soviet captivity, they separated by mutual agreement.

In December 1952 she married Siegfried Ender. Ina Ender took over the management of several expropriated companies. A little later, in the course of the workers' uprising , she was the victim of unfounded accusations by the specialist department of the Berlin magistrate, released from her job and expelled from the SED in December 1954 . As a result of the expulsion from the party, she could not find a qualified job and in May 1955 had to accept an underpaid job as a seamstress. In 1957 she was reassigned to the SED and in 1962 she worked in the main department of the Berlin Trade Organization. From 1965 to 1967 she was head of the department for study affairs at the college for foreign trade. From 1967 she had to retire from work for health reasons and was disabled in 1968. When her husband worked in Iraq from 1972 to 1975 as a scientific advisor to the President of the Trade Organization, she accompanied him there and worked in the field of financial policy. Back in the GDR , she occupied herself with youth work and maintaining tradition in the following years, gave lectures on the anti-fascist resistance struggle and, after the fall of the SED dictatorship in the GDR, became involved in the PDS at her place of residence in Lehnitz .

media

• Karl Heinz Jahnke : At home in the GDR . Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag Successor GmbH, Bonn 1999, ISBN 3-89144-266-1 .
• Hans Lautenschläger: At the side of Hans Coppi. Memories of Comrade Hans Lautenschläger about the struggle of the Schulze-Boysen / Harnack organization. Berlin 1980
• Gert Rosiejka: The Red Chapel. "Treason" as anti-fascist resistance. - with an introduction by Heinrich Scheel . results publisher: Hamburg 1986, ISBN 3-925622-16-0
• Leopold Trepper : The truth. Autobiography; dtv: Munich 1978
• Alexander Stillmark, Regina Griebel, Heinrich Scheel, Hans Coppi (ed.): Red Chapel - documents from the anti-fascist resistance . Two records with sound documents and booklet (2 LPs with sound recordings by Ina Ender, Hans Lautenschläger and others). VEB Deutsche Schallplatten, Berlin 1987, STEREO 865 395, 865 396

Web links

• Sculpture by Ina Ender

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} biography on Zeitzeugen-TV ( memento from January 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
2. ↑ Leopold Trepper: The truth. Autobiography; dtv: Munich 1978, p. 128.