Leo Bauer

Leopold Bauer (born Eliezer Lippa Ben Jossip David ha Cohen: 18 December 1912 – 18 September 1972) was a German political activist and journalist, originally from Galicia. For reasons of race and politics he spent the twelve Nazi years in exile. That eventful period included more than one year locked up by the authorities in Switzerland where grounds for his conviction included "damaging [Swiss] neutrality" ("Verletzung der Neutralität"). After 1945 he remained politically engaged. In 1953 he was deported by a military court in East Berlin to the Soviet Union for execution. In the event his sentence was commuted to a 25-year stretch in a Siberian labor camp. Then in October 1955, he was released to West Germany in the context of a general agreement between the governments in Bonn and Moscow for the return of surviving German prisoners of war. Leo Bauer later became a specialist advisor to Chancellor Brandt on East-West German relations ("Ostpolitik").

Life Provenance and early years Leopold Bauer was born in Skalat, a small town in Eastern Galicia which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In July 1914 war broke out. According to one source it was in order to get away from more pogroms that the family fled to the west. Within the organisation he was known by the code name "Rudi". ) Bauer resumed his illegal activity for the "M-Apparat". In Switzerland he lived illegally under the identity of a bank employee in Geneva and the name "Paul-Eric Perret". He became a Communist Party informant/contact ("Vertrauensmann") in West Switzerland and took part in "frontier work" involving the Franco-Swiss border.

In May 1944 he secured early release from the internment camp at Bassecourt, albeit subject to post-release conditions and monitoring (Aufbewahrungspflicht. In June 1944 he began to work for the National Committee for a Free Germany, an organisation having its origins in the prisoner of war camps of the Soviet Union which, during the final part of the war, was extending its remit outside the Soviet Union. Bauer became its regional leader for western Switzerland. There are also references for his having also been operating as a secret informant ("geheimer Mitarbeiter") for one of the Soviet intelligence services during his time in Frankfurt.

In 1949 Leo Bauer became editor-in-chief of Deutschlandsender, a radio station transmitting from the eastern (i.e. Soviet-occupied) part of central Berlin. A new long wave transmitter had been installed in 1947 in order to extend the reach of a service committed to the "ideological rearmament" ("ideologische Aufrüstung") of the western occupation zones. Paul Merker had been expelled from the party a week earlier. Merker was another of the leading party officers who had spent the Hitler years not in Moscow but in the west: for the "Moscow team" surrounding Walter Ulbricht that in itself seems to have aroused suspicion. There have also been commentators who have pointed out that a remarkably high proportion of East Germany's 1950 purge victims were Jewish.

Leo Bauer and his wife were arrested by the Ministry of State Security ("Stasi"). He was taken to the Stasi investigatory detention center in the Schumannstraße, and then to the main Stasi detention and interrogation center at Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. Then in August 1951 he was transferred again, this time to the Soviet military jail at Berlin-Karlshorst. (The Soviet occupation zone had been relaunched as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in October 1949, but fraternal military administrators remained present in large numbers at the Soviet military complex in Karlshorst.) During questioning Bauer was tortured both by his German and by his Russian interrogators. Negotiations involved slightly under 10,000 prisoners of war who had arrived as members of Hitler's invading armies during the early 1940s and approximately 20,000 German civilians, many of whom had arrived as political refugees and fallen foul of Stalin's purges or been imprisoned in the atmosphere of intensified paranoia that took hold in the Soviet Union following the German invasion of 1941. As a result of the agreement concluded during Adenauer's 1955 visit to Moscow the detainees were permitted to return to Germany with effect from 7 October 1955. Leo Bauer was included.

Since his enforced relocation to the Soviet occupation zone, the three western occupation zones had been merged and relaunched with a new currency in May 1949 as the US sponsored German Federal Republic (West Germany). This was the country to which Leo Bauer now returned, settling in Frankfurt am Main and launching himself on a new career as a "political educator" and journalist. In 1956 he rejoined the Social Democratic Party (from which he had withdrawn in 1931), although for many years there would be those inside the party who found his conversion from communism to social democracy unconvincing.

During 1957/58 Bauer worked as a member of the regular staff of the weekly news magazine Quick. Between 1959 and 1961 he worked as a freelance journalist. Headhunted by Henri Nannen, in 1961 he became social policy editor on another national weekly news magazine, Hamburg-based Stern.

During the middle 1960s, Leopold Bauer joined the circle of advisors around Willy Brandt, who in 1964 had succeeded the recently deceased Erich Ollenhauer as leader of the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD). Brandt admired Bauer's quick-witted insightfulness, and his deep understanding of the inner workings of the East German Leninist power structure and the workings of the comrades' quasi-socialist society. Brandt was sympathetic of the extent to which Bauer had suffered during his life. Although Bauer's advisory role was initially an informal one, in 1967, when Brandt wanted to reach out to the Communist Party of Italy, he appointed the ex-communist Leo Bauer to travel to Rome on behalf of the SPD party executive to make the first contacts.

Between 1968 and 1972 Bauer was the editor in chief of "Die Neue Gesellschaft", the SPD's rather cerebral monthly political magazine. He also signed a contract with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation as a research associate.

In 1969 Willy Brandt took over from Kurt Georg Kiesinger as Chancellor of Germany and Leo Bauer became a personal advisor to the chancellor, employed in the Federal Chancellery. He advised, principally, on East-West German relations ("Ostpolitik") at a time when the governments on both sides of the internal border were keen to regularise various pieces of unfinished business which had persisted since 1949. Yet despite his position at the heart of the West German political establishment, Bauer remained an outsider. Rumour persisted that Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski regarded Bauer's constant closeness to the chancellor as a threat to his own position of trust as the party's "chief executive" ("Parteigeschäftsführer"). As far as the party's deputy leader was concerned, Bauer himself stated that Helmut Schmidt was "likely to be one of those who believed his own role was diminished because [Bauer] was so firmly ensconced as Brandt's advisor".

Towards the end of his life Leopold Bauer became seriously ill as a result of the torture to which he had been subjected in the 1950s. He was still not quite 60 when he died in Bonn.