Herta Geffke

Herta Geffke (married name, Herta Kaasch: 19 August 1893 – 29 December 1974) was a German activist and politician (KPD, SED) who resisted Nazism. After 1945 she became a member of the Central Party Control Commission of the SED ( / ZPKK) in the Soviet occupation zone (from 1949 the German Democratic Republic), identified as a "true Stalinist" and feared on account of her interrogation methods.

Life

Family provenance and early years The eldest of her parents' six recorded children, Herta Geffke was born in (Frauendorf) on the north side of Stettin, at that time in Pomerania. Her father was a shoe maker: her mother worked as a washer-woman. On leaving school Herta Geffke herself went into domestic service, later moving on to become a print worker.

Activism and politics in Weimar Germany In March 1921 the party appointed her regional "women's secretary" for the politically and economically important Lower Rhine and Ruhr districts in the west of the country. As a party moderate at a time when Staliinist extremists were increasingly in the ascendant within the party, she did not stand for re-election to the Landtag in the regional elections of December 1924. )

Alongside her role in the regional parliament, she held important party responsibilities. From April 1946 she served as regional women's secretary for the Mecklenburg Party Executive. Following the controversial creation that month of the Socialist Unity Party ( / SED) she was one of many thousands who had lost no time in signing their Communist Party membership across to what now evolved into the ruling party for a new kind of one-party dictatorship. From 1947 she became a member of the regional party secretariat for Brandenburg. during the 1950s.

A specific investigation which she headed up, and which quickly acquired fame and/or notoriety, was the special ZPKK commission, starting in November 1949, to check out the contacts of party members with the US born spy Noel Field. Between 1954 and 1958 she served as deputy chair of the ZPKK. One source describes her in the role as "the archetypal harsh and uncompromising Stalinist functionary" .