Helene Berner

Helene Berner (real name Helene Welker: 13 December 1904 – 22 December 1992) was a gymnastics teacher who became a German resistance activist. She spent most of the twelve Nazi Years exiled in Moscow, where she took Soviet citizenship and established (or re-discovered) her connections with the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence). After 1945 she nevertheless returned to Berlin, becoming a party official in the Soviet occupation zone (relaunched in October 1949 as the German Democratic Republic / East Germany). Between 1949 and 1959 she was a senior officer at the Society for German–Soviet Friendship. She also became personal secretary to East Germany's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Georg Dertinger. Dertinger was not trusted by the party leadership, and it later emerged that Helene Berner was providing regular reports on him to the Ministry for State Security (Stasi).

Life Helene Welker was born in Berlin. Her father was a sculptor/stonemason and a party officer of the Social Democratic Party (which had been unbanned, renamed and relaunched in 1890). Her mother died young and her father remarried: she was bought up by her father and step mother, but left her parents' home directly after leaving school, when she was still only 14.

After the war ended she returned to Berlin, now using what had been her party name in Moscow, Helene Berner, as her only name. Between May and September 1945, still a Red Army officer, she led education courses at the Prisoner of War camp in Rüdersdorf, just outside Berlin on its eastern side. Then, between January 1946 and April 1948, she taught at the special academy set up in Königs Wusterhausen by the Soviet Military Administration to train future cadres of the Block Parties. These Block Parties were an important feature of the highly centralised Leninist power structure which had existed in the Soviet Union since the 1920s and was now being implemented in a number of central European former democracies and in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. In 1949 Helene Berner was demobilised, which put an end both to her Red army service responsibilities and to her intelligence activities on behalf of the GRU. During this time she was providing regular reports on her minister to the Ministry for State Security (Stasi). (Georg Dertinger fell out of favour dramatically in January 1953 when he was arrested. He faced a show trial for alleged espionage in 1954 and was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. )

Between 1959 and her retirement in 1968 Helene Berner ran the DSF, which was accommodated in the impressive Palais am Festungsgraben (as it has subsequently become known – loosely, "Moated Palace"), in the heart of East Berlin.

Awards and honours