Berta Daniel

Berta Daniel (born Berta Dick: 20 November 1896 – 7 April 1981) was a German photographer and political activist (KPD).

During the 1920s and 1930s, she worked for the illegal News Service of the Communist Party in Germany and for the Comintern as an "agent". In 1937, while in Moscow, she fell victim to the Stalin purges and was sentenced to eight years (subsequently increased) detention in a camp. She survived, but it was only in 1957 that she was rehabilitated and able to return to what had by now become the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic.

Life Berta Dick was born in Ulm. She was her parents' youngest recorded child: her six elder siblings were all brothers, however. By the time of her birth he was a social democrat city councillor in Ulm. Back in 1875 he had been a delegate at the congress in Gotha which had agreed the unification of the General German Workers' Association ("Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiter-Verein" / ADAV) and the Social Democratic Workers' Party ("Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands" / SDAP), paving the way for the creation of the unified Social Democratic Party. Their daughter, Lore (1920–2010), was born in Ulm on 17 May 1920.

Agent Berta Daniel was, from its beginning, a member of the AM-Apparat, an illegal Communist Party intelligence service which existed in Germany till 1937. By Autumn 1923 she was also responsible for administering party finances in the Stuttgart and Munich regions. - with the Comintern's Intelligence agency, also identified as the Comintern International Liaison Department ("Отдел международных связей Коминтерна" ОМС/OMS). The work involved a significant amount of foreign travel. Towards the end of 1935 she was arrested and sentenced in Vienna for a passport infringement. On her release a year later, she returned to Moscow in December 1936.

The Soviet capital was by now the scene of a major and sustained purge of actual and presumed enemies of the leadership, with intelligence workers and foreigners particularly vulnerable to denunciation. Berta Daniel was arrested by the NKVD in March 1937. She faced trial on 19 November 1937 and was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp. Richard Daniel, who worked in Moscow as a building engineer, would be arrested in February 1938 and die in a labour camp at Kotlas in June 1942. Her daughter, now aged 21, was able to pay her a two-hour visit in 1940. During 1942 Berta Daniel faced another trial, in Novosibirsk. Details are sparse, but the trial concluded with a sentence lasting an additional ten years. She was released in Tayshet at the end of 1952 after spending 15 years and 9 months in a succession of labour camps and other centres of detention between Moscow and Vladivostok. She was forcibly persuaded to remain in Tayshet. At some stage, however, she was able to obtain permission to go and live with her daughter, who had grown up while Berta Daniel was in the labour camps, and was now living in Kazan in Tatarstan, still a considerable distance to the east of Moscow.

One member of the intelligence community who had not fallen foul of the Stalin purges was Elena Stasova, with whom Daniel had worked at the IRH in the 1920s. Joseph Stalin died in March 1953, and in October 1953 Daniel wrote a letter to Stasova which the latter received, even though it was simply addressed to "Elena Stasova, Moscow city". It appears that it was as a result of their ensuing communication that on 28 January 1957 Richard Daniel was posthumously rehabilitated by the appropriate Moscow military tribunal. A couple of months later, on 26 March 1957, Berta Daniel, still very much alive, was rehabilitated by the same Moscow tribunal.

Berta Daniel and her daughter arrived from the Soviet Union in the German Democratic Republic on 27 June 1957. She now made her home in East Berlin. She lost little time in joining the young country's unchallenged ruling party, the Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED). It is believed that release from Soviet exile for Berta and Lore Daniel had been made possible because of the support of Elena Stasova.

Honors In 1969 she was honoured, receiving Germany's Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze. Berta Daniel died in East Berlin on 7 April 1981.