Alice Wosikowski

Alice Wosikowski (born Alice Ludwig; 18 October 1886 – 4 July 1949) was a German politician (SPD, KPD) who became a member of the Hamburg Parliament between 1927 and 1933. After 1933 she became a resistance activist: much of her life during the twelve Nazi years was spent in government detention institutions.

Life Alice Ludwig was born the youngest of four recorded siblings in Danzig in West Prussia (present-day Gdańsk, Poland). Her father was a master tailor. After leaving the local school she undertook a two-year traineeship for work as a Kindergarten teacher, and this is the profession she was still following in 1907 when she married Wilhelm Wosikowski, described variously as a machinist and a port worker. He was also a committed trades unionist and Social Democrat. Their first child, Eberhard, was born in 1908; Irene, their daughter, was born two years later. decided to further its objectives by working within the "women's and girls' Squadron" ("Frauen- und Mädchenstaffel") of the newly founded Anti-fascist Fighting Association ("Kampfbund gegen den Faschismus"). Like many exiled German communists Irene Wosikowski was in France in May/June 1940 when the German army annexed the northern half of the country and imposed a puppet government on the southern half. She was arrested and placed in the Gurs internment camp west of Lourdes, far to the south. But by the July 1940 Irene Wosikowski had, with others, escaped captivity. She now based herself in Marseille becoming, according to some versions, a member of the French resistance. One particularly high risk activity that she favoured involved engaging off-duty German soldiers in conversation in order to try and get them to think about the logic and objectives of genocide. She was arrested in July 1943 as a suspected spy, interrogated and badly tortured by the Marseille Gestapo before being transferred to occupied Paris where she was tortured as her interrogators again attempted, without success, to obtain the names of her contacts. The pattern was repeated when she was taken to Fuhlsbüttel in Germany and again after she was taken to the Barnim Street Women's Prison in Berlin. Alice Wosikowski learned of her daughter's arrest in March 1944 and was able to visit Irene in prison at least once. When visiting she was permitted to talk with her daughter. She was also engaged in conversation by "Gestapo man Teege". More than three years later Alice Wosikowski would find herself called upon to testify at Gestapo man Teege's war crimes trial. In her statement dated 13 January 1948 Alice Wosikowski testified that Teege had offered her the opportunity to work for the Gestapo. He intended her to understand that by accepting his offer she could save her daughter's life. Wosikowski had already related this encounter in a Hamburg newspaper in October 1946. Her reaction to Teege's suggestion was that her daughter would have looked upon her with total contempt if she had paid such a price to save her child's life. ("Meine Tochter würde mich verachten, wenn ich um solchen Preis ihren Kopf retten wollte.") Irene Wosikowski faced the special "People's Court" in Berlin on 13 September 1944 and was condemned to death. She was executed on 27 October 1944.

Directly after the war ended Alice Wosikowski returned to the Hamburger Volkszeitung, now as a deputy publishing head with a senior position in the finance department. In April 1949 she was elected to chair the newspaper section of the German Salaried Employees' Union ("Deutsche Angestellten-Gewerkschaft" / DAG). However, she died in Hamburg April or July 1949.