Elli Schmidt

Elli Paula Schmidt (9 August 1908 – 30 July 1980) was a German communist political activist with links to Moscow, where as a young woman she spent most of the war years. She returned in 1945 to what later (in 1949) became the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) where she pursued a successful political career till her fall from grace: that came as part of a wider clear out of peoples critical of the national leadership in the aftermath of the 1953 uprising. She was formally rehabilitated on 29 July 1956, but never returned to mainstream politics.

Life Provenance and early years Elli Schmidt was born in Berlin-Wedding, an inner city district of the German capital. Her father was a police official. She attended school locally and then, between 1922 and 1926, undertook an apprenticeship in dressmaking. In or before 1929 she became a member of the Communist Party itself. In 1935, according to one source, she even took on the leadership of the underground Communist Party for Berlin. During July/August 1935 she took part in the 7th (and final) World Congress of the Comintern (which was held in Moscow). She also participated in the German Communist Party's so-called Brussels Party Conference in October of that year. In 1940 Schmidt was one of the political refugees who transferred from Paris to Moscow: she remained in the Soviet Union till 1945. In any event, the two of them lived together as man and wife till 1949, by which time it appears they had at some point formally married.

Mainstream politician after the war in the Soviet occupation zone / German Democratic Republic Hundreds of thousands of Germans had ended up deep inside in the Soviet Union by the time the war ended in May 1945, mostly as political refugees or as prisoners of war, and for most of them it would take many months or several years before they were able to return. However, on 30 April 1945 a group of thirty men – the so-called Ulbricht Group – arrived from Moscow by plane in Berlin, keen to waste no time in implementing their project for the Soviet occupation zone, a large central chunk of what had previously been Germany, sandwiched between the three "western" occupation zones and the eastern third of what had been Germany, which was now incorporated into Poland, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. Schmidt's partner, Anton Ackermann, was a leading member of that group of thirty men. Elli Schmidt herself returned to Germany in June 1945 at the same time as Wilhelm Pieck. She was still a member of the (no longer banned) Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany. She and Ackermann were two of the sixteen