Johanna Melzer

Johanna Melzer (7 April 1904 - 3 October 1960) was a German political activist and Communist Party member who participated in the German resistance to Nazism. She spent eleven of the twelve years of the Third Reich in prison, earning the soubriquet "Iron Johanna" ("Eiserne Johanna") for her ability to remain silent under torture. After the end of World War II, she became a regional politician in West Germany.

Early life Johanna Melzer was born on April 7, 1904 in Oberwaldenburg, a mining village in Lower Silesia close to the German frontier with Bohemia, southwest of Breslau. Her father was a miner. When she was a child, her family relocated to the Ruhr region in connection with her father's work: she attended junior school in Rünthe, before moving on to a commercially focused secondary school in Hamm. beside the Main Railway Station in Dortmund. The more direct concern for the authorities in West Germany appears to have involved not her Communist Party membership, but her position within the DFD, which was seen as a proxy for the East German government and its ruling party.

Later life and death The political separation implicit in the military occupation zones created in 1945 came to be enforced by a physical frontier during the 1950s. In 1956, Melzer relocated to East Berlin, where she lived till her death there on the night of 2/3 October 1960. There are suggestions that her health was damaged and her life thereby shortened by torture she had suffered at the hands of the Gestapo. Her sister Klara's attempts to have the 1953 indictment lifted posthumously were rejected by the West German authorities who inferred that her relocation to East Germany in 1956 was tantamount to a confession of guilt.