Rachel Dübendorfer

Rachel Dübendorfer (born July 18, 1900 in Warsaw , † March 3, 1973 in East Berlin ) was a Polish-German communist and resistance fighter of Jewish descent.

Life

Dübendorfer was born as the daughter of bank director Adolf Hepner. She grew up in Danzig . From the 1920s she received German citizenship and was married to Kurt Caspary. Later she was the partner of Paul Böttcher .

In 1918 she was a member of the Spartakusbund and thus became a founding member of the KPD . In the 1920s she was politically active in the Red Women and Girls' Union (RFMB) and in the Red Aid . From 1925 to 1932 she worked as a stenographer for the Central Committee of the KPD.

In 1927 it was for the intelligence service GRU of the Red Army operates. In 1933 she fled to Switzerland, where she married Heinrich Dübendorfer in 1934 to acquire Swiss citizenship. Until 1939 she was employed by the International Labor Office (ILO) in Geneva .

From 1940 to 1944, together with Böttcher, she ran an independent residency of the GRU in Geneva, which existed independently of the Sándor Radós and Leopold Trepper networks and had sources of information, particularly in Switzerland, Germany and France. It received its most important from the former ILO colleague Christian Schneider from the Swiss military intelligence service Bureau Ha .

In 1944 she was briefly imprisoned in Switzerland. In October 1945 she was sentenced in absentia to two years in prison by a Swiss military court. She fled via Canada to the Soviet Union, where she was imprisoned until 1956 and then released to the GDR. It was not until 1969 that the Soviet government awarded them the Order of the Red Banner .

In 1970 she was awarded the Silver Patriotic Order of Merit in the GDR .

People of the "Red Chapel"

→ Main article : People of the "Red Chapel"

literature

• Peter Kamber: Secret Agent. BasisDruck, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86163-097-5 . ( Internet attachment , PDF file; 4.2 MB)
• Peter Kamber: Csatorna Berlinbe - Rachel Dübendorfer, Christian Schneider és Rudolf Roessler. [Canal to Berlin - Rachel Dübendorfer, Christian Schneider and Rudolf Roessler.] In: Hegedüs, Ábel / Suba, János (ed.): Tanulmányok Radó Sándorról. A Budapest 2009. nov. 4-5-én rendezet konferencia elöadásainak szerkesztett anyaga. [Studies on Alexander Radó. Edited versions of the lectures at the scientific conference held in Budapest on November 4-5, 2009]. HM Hadtörténeti Intézet és Múzeum [War History Institute and Museum of the Hungarian Ministry of Defense]: Budapest 2010, pp. 45–73
• Bernd Ruland : The eyes of Moscow. Swiss publishing house: Zurich 1973
• Alexander S. Blank, Julius Mader: Red band against Hitler. Verlag der Nation: Berlin 1979

Web links

• Hermann Wichers : Rachel Dübendorfer. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• "WE INVITE YOU, DEAR DORA, TO BE CALM". Radio messages from the Soviet secret service DER SPIEGEL 4/1967

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hermann Wichers : Rachel Dübendorfer. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . June 10, 2002 , accessed July 14, 2018 .
2. ↑ Dead link ( Memento of the original from January 20, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ Berliner Zeitung , May 6, 1970, p. 6