Lena Fischer

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Helene "Lena" Fischer , née Helene Schirmann (born May 28, 1906 in Munich , † October 14, 1985 in Berlin ) was a German communist and resistance fighter against National Socialism. In the GDR she was part of the first Central Committee of the SED before she was expelled from the SED and sentenced.

Life

Youth and activity in the KJVD

Lena Fischer was born as Helene Schirmann as the daughter of a Russian-Jewish engineer on May 28, 1906 in Munich . She attended the secondary school for daughters and commercial schools in Zurich and, after graduating from high school, worked as a typist and correspondent for the Berlin guarantee and credit bank from 1925. In 1927 Fischer joined the KJVD and from 1929 took over the honorary management of the large Berlin children's organization of the KJVD, later the management of the KJVD in Berlin-Wedding . After she married the communist youth functionary Franz Fischer in 1929, she had German citizenship. The marriage was divorced in January 1933. In 1930 she became a member of the KPD . After the National Socialist seizure of power and the political illegality, Fischer was commissioned by the Central Committee of the KJVD in the spring of 1933 to set up and lead illegal youth work in the Saxon districts as chief instructor. At the end of 1934 she also took part in the Reich Conference of the KJVD in Moscow, where she was co-opted into the Central Committee of the KJVD. She had to give up her job at the bank that same year.

On April 12, 1935, Fischer traveled to Dresden to meet an alleged representative of the illegal KPD district leadership in Saxony. The KPD representative, however, was a high-ranking Dresden Gestapo officer, to whom she innocently reported for two hours in detail about her work as the KJVD's chief instructor. After meeting in a café on Postplatz in Dresden , Fischer was arrested and interrogated and severely abused over the following days. After Fischer had realized how deeply the Gestapo had penetrated the illegal network of the KJVD in Saxony, she recommended that other arrested persons who were confronted with her admit known facts and names in order to prevent a deeper infiltration into the structures of the KJVD. In August 1936 the People's Court sentenced her to life imprisonment, which she served in Waldheim prison.

Moscow years

After Fischer's mother and brother, who were living in Moscow at the time , learned of the conviction, they turned to the International Red Aid and petitioned the Soviet government asking for Fischer to be included in a prisoner exchange with Germany. This request was also supported by Wilhelm Pieck , Walter Ulbricht , Philipp Dengel and Georgi Dimitroff . As a result, in the spring of 1937, the German ambassador in Moscow, Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg , was actually presented with a list of four names of people in custody in Germany who the Soviet Union was interested in leaving. Lena Fischer was one of these four people. She was then taken to the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin in June 1937 and consented to the exchange, renouncing her German citizenship. As a result, she arrived in Moscow on August 1, 1937.

When she arrived in Moscow, she first had to write a detailed report on the circumstances of her arrest and the interrogations, and submit it to the cadre chief of the German section at the Executive Committee of the Communist International, Georg Müller, and the representative of the KJVD at the Youth International, Walter Hähnel . However, she withheld the incriminating statements in the report. Looking back, she said in a letter to Walter Ulbricht in 1956 : If I kept silent in Moscow at the time, it was out of fear and I think that anyone who knows the situation at that time (1937/38) will understand that. Today, after Beria was exposed, this fear becomes more understandable, but back then the fear was on the back of the neck . Fischer was referring to the time of the Great Terror , which was approaching its climax when she arrived in Moscow. Even then she learned in Moscow that many of the comrades she knew who had fled to the Soviet Union had disappeared.

The review of her report lasted until the early summer of 1938. Although Fischer wanted to start political work again, she was constantly put off. The arrest of her brother delayed the start of political activity again. It was only after a letter to Georgi Dimitrov , which she addressed to him on May 10, 1938, that she was hired as an employee of the Youth International. Some time later she switched to the Zentral-Zeitung, where she worked as a shorthand typist. After her brother was sentenced, she was forced to vacate this job. She then worked as an instructor in a Moscow jersey factory until 1940. At the end of 1939 Fischer was questioned again on the basis of new findings from KJVD functionaries who had emigrated to Paris. In evaluating these findings, the small commission of the KPD Politburo, consisting of Walter Ulbricht, Herbert Wehner and Philipp Dengel, decided on January 9, 1940 to give Fischer a reprimand. Afterwards she was employed as a teacher for German at the International Red Aid in Moscow. Only after Germany's attack on the Soviet Union was Fischer allowed to become active again in propaganda. Until June 1947 she worked as a translator, editor and spokeswoman, mainly for youth and women's programs on Moscow Radio. During this activity she also met Heinrich Greif , who acted as the main spokesman for the German broadcasts. Since Greif's mother lived in Lena Fischer's household after his death, it is assumed that Fischer and Heinrich Greif had a love affair.

Return to Germany

Fischer returned to Berlin in mid-June 1947. She was accepted into the SED and from August 1947 worked as a consultant and instructor in the women's secretariat of the central secretariat of the SED party executive, which was headed by Elli Schmidt . However, more than a year before Fischer's return, from February 1946, the cadre department of the Central Committee of the KPD, which was still in existence at the time, had asked the Dresden KPD district leadership to clarify questions relating to Lena Fischer. In the course of the clarification, the interrogation protocol of the former Gestapo man Erich Brauns was particularly important, as it confirmed the exchange of prisoners despite arrest and conviction. He justified the exchange with the importance of her person. After the Saxon SED state executive had been warned several times by the SED party executive regarding the final clarification of the Fischer issue, Hans Lauter , who was directly affected in 1934, made a detailed statement. This statement and statements from other Lauter inmates such as Anni Sindermann , Heinz Gronau or Horst Jonas exonerated Fischer. As a result, she was initially employed as the first secretary of the SED district leadership in Berlin-Köpenick. On the III. German People's Congress, which met at the end of May 1949 and elected 330 members from among its number for the 2nd German People's Council, Fischer was also elected to this parliamentary body. Even after the GDR was founded on October 7, 1949, it was a member of the provisional People's Chamber that was constituted until October 1950. At the end of 1949 she moved to the secretariat of the SED state leadership in Berlin. On the III. At the SED party congress in July 1950, she was elected as a member of the SED Central Committee. Fischer then worked in the secretariat of the SED regional leadership in Berlin and was confirmed in new elections in July 1952.

Fischer and the ZPKK

Nevertheless, Fischer was repeatedly the focus of internal party investigations. After the Rajk trial in Hungary and the Noel Field affair at the latest , the Central Party Control Commission (ZPKK) carried out old surveys and investigations again. In December 1950, Fischer was summoned by the ZPKK and questioned again in detail about the circumstances of her arrest, the first interrogation, her statements to the Gestapo and her trial before the People's Court. After several surveys that dragged on for months, since Fischer was also in the preparation of the III. World Festival in Berlin was involved, the ZPKK made the draft resolution in August 1951 to release her from her functions as a member of the Central Committee of the SED and in the secretariat of the SED state leadership in Berlin. From then on, she was only granted functions at the district level. The reason for the decision was that, through her attitude towards the Gestapo during the arrest, she made a significant contribution to enticing younger comrades to give the Gestapo a deep insight into the structures of the KJVD. The betrayal of Hans Lauter and Maria Rott was also attributed to her, although Lauter had exonerated Fischer in a personal conversation after her return to Germany. However, the resolution was initially not implemented, and Fischer remained in office in her party functions until mid-March 1953. On March 12, 1953, at the meeting of the secretariat of the SED district leadership in Berlin, it was decided to appoint Fischer as head of the organization and deployment commission for the May 1st celebrations.

On March 17, 1953, however, at an extensive Politburo meeting, the second item on the agenda decided to expel Lena Fischer from the party for treason before the Gestapo as part of measures to ward off hostile activity in the party and to increase vigilance . Unlike in 1951, when her position was reprimanded before the Gestapo and she was still allowed to remain in the party, Fischer was now accused of treason and she was expelled from the party. With the same reason, Hans Lauter, at least a member of the secretariat of the Central Committee of the SED, was expelled from the Central Committee and dismissed from his position as Secretary of the Central Committee. However, he remained a party member. But the starting point was the initiation of an investigation by ZPKK into the connections between Franz Dahlem and Noel Field. It should be noted that Fischer and Lauter did not receive these party penalties in connection with Noel Field. However, these resolutions were initially kept secret. Only in connection with Dahlem's exclusion from the Central Committee and the release from all party functions, which was announced at the 13th plenum of the Central Committee, which took place on May 13 and 14, 1953, were the resolutions on Lauter and Fischer in the SED Central organ Neues Deutschland published. Her arrest was linked to the decision on Lena Fischer. In September 1953 she was sentenced to four years in prison by the Rostock District Court, which she served in the Brandenburg prison . After a pardon from GDR President Wilhelm Pieck, she was released from prison on November 19, 1955.

Rehabilitation efforts

After her release and return to East Berlin, Fischer immediately sought to rehabilitate and restore her party membership. From the beginning of 1956 she found work in a municipal wholesaler for dairy products and eggs in Berlin. After the general political weather situation within the SED had turned after the 20th party congress of the CPSU , the party set up a commission in the spring of 1956 to review the affairs of party members . Under the impressions of the 20th party congress, the party was supposed to examine the legality of the party penalties imposed in the first half of the 1950s. This commission largely included the same members who had previously imposed the party penalties in the Central Party Control Commission. SED functionaries such as Herta Geffke and Max Sens checked the legality of the decisions they had taken a few years earlier. Fischer turned to this commission shortly after they began their work. While its application to re-establish party membership was postponed by one year on June 14, 1956, the ZPKK decided on January 12, 1957 to re-establish its membership since 1930. The reasoning was as follows: According to the ZPKK, the Conviction not justified and a party decision would have been sufficient. The rehabilitation itself was not carried out publicly.

Fischer then worked in municipal wholesale until she retired, most recently as director of the dairy products wholesale company. She was recognized as being persecuted by the Nazi regime and from 1974 worked as the deputy chairwoman of the district committee of anti-fascist resistance fighters in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. She never returned to party offices. Various state honors, some of which were associated with cash bonuses, can be seen as a substitute for public rehabilitation that never took place. In addition, there was a reconciliation with the party, documented in the media over the years, which culminated in a greeting from Berlin party veterans at the 10th party congress of the SED. In the message published on April 25, 1981 in Neues Deutschland , Fischer's name can also be found among the signatories. A short time later, on her 75th birthday, there was also an official greeting address from the SED Central Committee, which was printed in the SED central organ.

After her death, Fischer was buried on November 18, 1985 in the central cemetery in Berlin-Friedrichfelde .

Honors

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Neues Deutschland from May 20, 1953, p. 3f.
  2. ↑ Berliner Zeitung of January 4, 1962 p. 8.
  3. ↑ Neues Deutschland from April 25, 1981 p. 3.
  4. ↑ Neues Deutschland from May 28, 1981 p. 4.
  5. ↑ Neues Deutschland from October 31, 1985 p. 7.
  6. ↑ Berliner Zeitung of March 8, 1964 p. 5
  7. ↑ Neues Deutschland from June 26, 1976 p. 5
personal data
SURNAME Fischer, Lena
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fischer, Helene; Schirmann, Helene (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist and resistance fighter against National Socialism
DATE OF BIRTH May 28, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH October 14, 1985
Place of death Berlin