Eleonore Staimer

Eleonore Staimer (née Pieck: 14 April 1906 – 7 November 1998) was a German Communist Party activist and official. After 1945 she undertook work for the KPD and SED Party, later becoming an East German diplomat. She served as her country's first Ambassador to Yugoslavia between 1966 and 1969.

She was Wilhelm Pieck's youngest daughter. Her mother, born Christine Häfker, had been a garments worker at the time of her marriage, and also at some point worked as a "home worker" for a Bremen cigarette factory: Mentzel's principal focus in the parliament was on securing proper treatment of political prisoners, but there are indications that Elenore Pieck's duties were relatively broadly based, and that her work for the parliament involved providing secretarial and administrative support to the entire Communist group in it. Eleanore's mother died from a recurrence of her by now chronic pneumonia in a Moscow clinic at the start of December 1936. )

By 1934 Eleanore Pieck was working as a typing assistant with the "Comintern Youth" organisation and the "Internationaler Revolutionärer Theaterbund", which had been set up a few years earlier by her brother. Starting in 1934 she is identified as an "Agitprop Secretary".

Many of the political refugees from Germany who had settled in Moscow during the 1930s in order to get away from Hitler, and then been evacuated with the native Muscovites in 1941, were left in their remote places of exile for years. Others joined the hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war who had survived monumental military defeat at Stalingrad, only to end up in the Soviet camps. Party General Secretary Stalin was a famously mistrustful man at the best of times, and the arrival of three million well-equipped German soldiers on Soviet territory in June 1941, together with the ensuing slaughter and destruction, had evidently made him more mistrustful than ever of German people. But there were still a few German comrades whom he trusted. Wilhelm Pieck (who had been seriously ill as an evacuee in Bachkiria) returned to Moscow on 27 March 1942. Yugoslavia had become politically distanced from the Soviet Union during the 1950s, and the diplomatic relationship between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union's central European "allies" was a correspondingly low-key affair. During the 1960s a slow and tentative rapprochement began, however, and in October 1966 Eleonore Staimer became East Germany's first ever ambassador to Yugoslavia, remaining in the post till February 1969. Her next posting was back in Berlin where she worked at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs till October 1970.

Later years In November 1970 she became deputy director of the East German travel office, with her responsibilities focused on relationships with foreign travellers, publicity work and market research.

She retired in 1975, following which she became actively engaged as a member of the Berlin committee of Anti-fascist resistance fighters, a heavily politicised patriotic-nationalistic organisation with close links to the ruling party. She was cremated and buried with her mother in the Pergolenweg section of Berlin's Friedrichsfelde Cemetery.

Personal Eleanor Pieck married Josef Springer in 1939. She had met him through her work with the Comintern. The marriage reportedly lasted till 1945. There is no reference to Springer having accompanied his wife when she returned from the Soviet Union to Germany in 1945. Between 1947 and 1954 she was married to Richard Staimer. The two of them had been evacuated to Ufa from Moscow in 1941, and had presumably got to know each other at that time. Available sources are almost entirely silent about both marriages.

Awards and honours