Elli Schmidt

Elli Paula Schmidt (9 August 1908 – 30 July 1980) was a German communist political activist with links to Moscow, where as a young woman she spent most of the war years.

She worked in various Berlin fashion houses during the 1920s, and continued to be employed in the sector till 1932.

She attended school locally and then, between 1922 and 1926, undertook an apprenticeship in dressmaking.

She joined the "Fichte" workers' sports association in 1926 and the Young Communists in 1927.

In or before 1929 she became a member of the Communist Party itself.

She was a member of the local party leadership team ("Bezirksleitung") for Berlin-Brandenburg between 1929 and 1932, heading up the "Women's Department" within it during 1931/32.

Schmidt trained for party work at the Comintern's International Lenin School in Moscow between October 1932 and 1934.

While she was abroad, in January 1933 the National Socialists took power and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship.

By the time she returned home in the Autumn 1934 the Communist Party had been banned and political activity in support of it was illegal.

Many comrades had been arrested or fled abroad, and one source describes as illegal her action in returning to Germany.

In 1934 she was appointed policy-leader and trades union instructor for the underground party operation in the "Lower Rhine Region" ("Bezirk Niederrhein").

In 1935, according to one source, she even took on the leadership of the underground Communist Party for Berlin.

During July/August 1935 she took part in the 7th (and final) World Congress of the Comintern (which was held in Moscow).

She also participated in the German Communist Party's so-called Brussels Party Conference in October of that year.

Elsewhere it is stated that the two of them were married back in 1935 when they met as a result of their work in the Comecon.

She continued to work illegally in Germany till 1937.

She had to flee to Prague in 1937, and from there moved on to Paris where she worked as a member of the Central Committee Secretariat with the German party leadership in exile between 1937 and 1940.

In 1940 Schmidt was one of the political refugees who transferred from Paris to Moscow: she remained in the Soviet Union till 1945.

When the German Army launched their invasion in June 1941 she was evacuated to the spa settlement of Lesnoi (Krasnye Baki) on the Vetluga River, returning to Moscow in 1942 after the crisis had peaked.

At one stage she worked for "Inradio".

The marriage produced two children, born approximately in 1941 and 1948 respectively.

Then from Autumn 1942 she was working with the special German People's Radio ("Deutscher Volkssender") German-language radio service, later becoming "women's editor" on it.

She also worked with the National Committee for a Free Germany, which was increasingly involved in planning and documenting the plans for the postwar period.

She returned in 1945 to what later (in 1949) became the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) where she pursued a successful political career till her fall from grace: that came as part of a wider clear out of comrades critical of the national leadership in the aftermath of the 1953 uprising.

According to one source, during her time in Moscow Elli Schmidt began to live with the comrade generally identified by his party pseudonym as Anton Ackermann, a leading member of the team that would embark on a carefully choreographed nation building programme under the leadership of Walter Ulbricht in the Soviet occupation zone after April 1945.

Hundreds of thousands of Germans had ended up deep inside in the Soviet Union by the time the war ended in May 1945, mostly as political refugees or as prisoners of war, and for most of them it would take many months or several years before they were able to return.

However, on 30 April 1945 a group of thirty men – the so-called Ulbricht Group – arrived from Moscow by plane in Berlin, keen to waste no time in implementing their project for the Soviet occupation zone, a large central chunk of what had previously been Germany, sandwiched between the three "western" occupation zones and the eastern third of what had been Germany, which was now incorporated into Poland, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

Schmidt's partner, Anton Ackermann, was a leading member of that group of thirty men.

Elli Schmidt herself returned to Germany in June 1945 at the same time as Wilhelm Pieck.

She was still a member of the (no longer banned) Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany.

She and Ackermann were two of the sixteen co-signatories of the "Communist Party Appeal ... to the German people" of 11 June 1945 (still using her party pseudonym, "Irene Gärtner").

At the Brussels Conference she was elected to the party's Central Committee, remaining a member till the party itself was replaced in 1946.

During the National Socialist years she was identified by a party pseudonym as "Irene Gärtner".

There are indications that she was the only woman to be a member of the central committee during this period.

In 1948 Schmidt became the first head of the Democratic Women's League ("Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands" / DFD), one of several government backed mass organisations included in the highly centralised power structure then being developed for the country.

In any event, the two of them lived together as man and wife till 1949, by which time it appears they had at some point formally married.

Between 1950 and 1954 she was a member of the Central Committee of the ruling Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED), but within the Central Committee she never progressed beyond the candidates' list for Politburo membership.

Elli Schmidt was born in Berlin-Wedding, an inner city district of the German capital.

Her father was a police official.

She was formally rehabilitated on 29 July 1956, but never returned to mainstream politics.