Friedel Apelt

Friedel Apelt (1 November 1902 - 12 December 2001) was a German political activist, trades union official and politician (KPD/SED). During the Nazi years she participated actively in anti-fascist resistance, and spent much of the time in prison or as a concentration camp internee. After the war she was able to resume her political career in the Soviet occupation zone (relaunched, in October 1949, as the German Democratic Republic).

During a long political career she was married three times, and she may be identified in sources by any one of four names. Before her first marriage she was Frieda (or Friedel) Raddünz. After her first marriage, in 1925, she became Friedel Franz. Between 1946 and 1952 she was Friedel Malter. She retained her final name, Friedel Apelt, for nearly fifty years, between 1952 and 2001.

Life Provenance and early years Frieda Anna Charlotte Raddünz was born in Breslau. Her father worked as a typesetter. She attended middle school locally and then worked as a weaver and homeworker, initially still in Breslau between 1917 and 1923, and again between 1927 and 1930.

Friedel Franz

She married Adolf Franz, a miner, in 1925. He was a local Communist Party leader. In 1925 Friedel Franz joined the Textile Workers' Trades Union ("Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband" / DTV), remaining a member till her exclusion from it in 1929. She was also a works council member between 1927 and 1930. As political tensions rose across Germany, in 1929 she became a member of the Revolutionary Union Opposition ("Revolutionäre Gewerkschafts Opposition" / RGO) movement. During the later 1920s she was also, for a period, a member of the district council for Waldenburg. She also served in the Ministry for Labour and Professional Training as a secretary of state and deputy minister between 1950 and 1956.

Friedel Apelt In November 1952, she married , a Weimar-era KPD activist who had emigrated in 1935 after being interned in the Kislau and Heuberg camps and returned after the war, eventually being appointed secretary of state and deputy culture minister in 1954. Friedel Apelt retired from all her full-time posts in 1956 on health grounds, although she continued to hold a number of less onerous, honorary and part-time positions. Apelt lived out her final years in the "Clara Zetkin Old People's Home" ("Senioreneinrichtung Clara-Zetkin-Heim") in Berlin's Friedrichshagen quarter. She died in Friedrichshagen during the first half of December 2001, although sources differ over her precise date of death. Virtually till the end of her life she was involved in the debate over restitution for former concentration camp inmates who had been forced to work at the Genshagen Daimler-Benz plant.

Awards and honours Clara Zetkin Medal (1955) Patriotic Order of Merit in Silver (1956) Banner of Labor (1962) Patriotic Order of Merit in Gold (1967) Order of Karl Marx (1977) Star of People's Friendship in Gold (1982) Fritz Heckert medal