Helga Mucke-Wittbrodt

Helga Mucke-Wittbrodt ( Nydahl; 11 September 1910 – 4 May 1999) was a German physician for nearly forty years. She was the medical director at the East German Government Hospital. In connection with this, for forty years she was a member of the National legislature , representing not a political party but the Democratic Women's League ( / DFD). Although her medical abilities were evidently well attested, the length of her tenure at the hospital and the number of national honours that she accumulated over the years indicate that she was also highly prized by the authorities for her discretion and "political reliability".

Many sources use her double family name "Mucke-Wittbrodt" which incorporates the names of her first and second husbands. However, some sources identify her simply as Helga Wittbrodt. Her father became a school inspector in 1919 and in 1921, the family relocated to Berlin when he was appointed to a senior role in the national school administration. The SAJ was in effect the youth wing of the Social Democratic Party ( / SPD) of which her increasingly political father was already a member, and which she herself had joined by 1933. towards the end of the 1930s she came into contact with the resistance movement. She was able to help victims of government persecution by falsifying medical certificates. The division of Berlin into military occupation zones agreed in 1945 was by now acquiring a level of permanence that few would have anticipated three years earlier, and she now relocated from the American occupation zone to the Soviet occupation zone, taking a post as a senior internist at the Charité (hospital).

Bernd Brückner was Erich Honecker's personal body guard for thirteen years. Later he wrote a memoire, in which he recalled two of the doctors who had looked after his boss. Of Helga Wittbrodt he writes:

"I found her an agreeable, modest but at the same time self-confident character, who carried out her work with supreme calm. No question of some overbearing semi-divinity in a white coat."

"Ich empfand sie als eine angenehme, bescheidene und zugleich selbstbewusste Persönlichkeit, die mit soveräner Gelassenheit auftrat. Kein Halb-oder Ganzgott im weissem Kittel." For the next forty years there would be rumours and reports (appearing outside East Germany) that its patients enjoyed a superior quality of treatment, with access to drugs from the west not normally made available for treating East German patients and even, as they recovered, access to West German newspapers. She remained in post for a couple of years before she died.

Mucke-Wittbrodt was also more directly engaged in the national power apparatus. Between 1950 and 1952 she was a member of the party leadership for Greater Berlin. 1980 Star of People's Friendship in Gold Clara Zetkin Medal Hufeland Medal in Gold Honoured Doctor of the People