Bertha Thalheimer

Bertha Thalheimer (17 March 1883 – 23 April 1959) was a German left-wing peace activist who became a politician (KPD).

Life Provenance and early years Bertha Thalheimer was born in Affaltrach in southern Germany, a short distance to the east of Heilbronn. Moritz Thalheimer, her father, was a prosperous businessman and real estate agent with an active interest in politics. He was close to some of the leading Social Democrat left-wingers of his generation, including Clara Zetkin and the Mehrings. Thanks to her father's political connections she also met the pioneering thinker Rosa Luxemburg fairly early on. As long as they both lived, Bertha and her brother would be closely aligned politically. and for the Stuttgart-based "Arbeiter-Tribüne".

Nazi years The political backdrop changed, as it seemed, permanently in January 1933 when the Nazi Party took power in Germany and lost little time in transforming the country into a one-party dictatorship. The Nazis had built their support base on the traditional populist twin pillars of hope and hate. The principal targets of their hate were Communists and Jews. From a Nazi perspective Bertha Thalheimer qualified as both Communist and Jewish. This was the context in which Karl Wilhelm Schöttle, who was categorised as an Aryan, and Bertha Thalheimer were now divorced, although she continued to receive material support from her former husband. In 1943 she was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. From 1952 Bertha Thalheimer took responsibility for Arbeiterpolitik's newspaper.

However, Thalheimer's health had been permanently damaged by the rigours of life at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. On 23 April 1959 Bertha Schöttle-Thalheimer died in Stuttgart. The street Bertha-Thalheimer-Weg in Stuttgart is named after her.