Anna Tieke

Anna Tieke (born Anna Wittenburg: 11 November 1898 - 15 January 1938) was a German communist. With her family she relocated to the Soviet Union in 1931. On 15 January 1938 Anna Tieke and her son Rudolf, identified as "suspected German spies", were shot and killed in Leningrad. Formal "rehabilitation" came posthumously, in 1956.

Provenance and early years Anna Wittenburg was born in Berlin, the daughter of a carpenter. After leaving school she became a clerk. She was also politically engaged, joining the Young Socialists ("Arbeiter-Jugend") in 1911. To judge from the birth dates of their children, it was around 1915 that she married Rudolf Tieke (1895 – 1989), a gardener who later took work in the chemicals industry. During the 1920s his political activities and affiliations were broadly similar to hers. Between 1917 and 1922 she was a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party ("Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / USPD) which had broken away from the mainstream Social Democratic Party in 1917, primarily because of rejection of the decision of the party leadership to operate what amounted to a parliamentary truce over funding for the war. A year later disaster struck in the form a massive famine across (and beyond) the entire Caucasus region. Historians still argue over how far the famine resulted from natural causes - primarily drought - and how far it reflected political and logistical failures caused by government implementation of enforced collectivisation. The widespread death from starvation was in any case real enough. The Tiekes narrowly avoided death by starvation thanks to the Comintern which managed to arrange their return to Moscow. The woods have been redesignated as a "memorial cemetery". Memorials have been set up by relatives, descendants and others to some of the victims whose remains are believed to have ended up in the mass graves. Among these, in 2011 a memorial stone was placed to the memory of Anna Tieke and her son Rudi. They are among 28 men and women identified in the mass graves who were originally arrested while living at the "Community House" at Detskaya ulitsa 3, falsely charged and then killed, but posthumously rehabilitated.