Luise Kraushaar

Luise Kraushaar ( Szepansky; 13 February 1905 – 10 January 1989) was a German political activist who became a Resistance campaigner against National Socialism and who also, after she left Germany, worked in the French Resistance. She later became a historian, employed at Berlin's Marxism–Leninism Institute in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

Life It is not clear when nor precisely how Luise Szepansky became Luise Kraushaar: sources generally refer to her as Luise Kraushaar throughout.

Luise Kraushaar was born in Berlin where her father worked as a graphic artist and painter (Malermeister). During the first part of her life the family lived in the working class inner city Wedding quarter, but by the time war broke out in July 1914 they had relocated to Mariendorf, a manufacturing town then on the southern edge of Berlin, and subsequently subsumed into it. In 1919 Kraushaar joined one of the Freie sozialistische Jugend (Free Socialist Youth) movements proliferating in the political and social turbulence that followed the end of the war. The next year she became a member of the newly formed Kommunistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands (KJVD / Young Communist League), later becoming president of its Mariendorf district branch.

She joined the ZdA (trades union) in 1923 and in 1924, the year of her nineteenth birthday, she became a member of Communist Party itself. Roth is sometimes identified as an "agent" or a man responsible for "special contacts",

Kraushaar's secretarial tasks involved "special duties" such as decoding encrypted messages, as well as typing up reports and lists of names. sisters, the elder of whom, Rosa Dukas, handled the rental of the room and the younger of whom, Helen Dukas, was employed as a secretary by one of Berlin's most famous residents, Albert Einstein. The sisters went out to work during the day, so that for most of the time she was working in it Kraushaar had the apartment to herself. Both Luise Kraushaar and Leo Roth had their own keys to the apartment. Kraushaar undertook secretarial work for Bahnik until she emigrated in early 1934, at which point her secretarial duties in Berlin were taken over by Erna Eifler, who would be murdered by gunshot at Ravensbrück in 1944.

Régime change came to Germany in January 1933 and the new government lost little time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. The Communist Party was banned and Kraushaar's work for it became illegal. In March 1934, Kraushaar escaped to Prague, moving on shortly afterwards to Moscow In April 1939, she started working in a secretarial capacity for the Paris Emigrant Committee. Fellow internees included Irene Wosikowski and , exiled German communists who had been based with Kraushaar in France ever since the three women had been sent to Paris from Moscow at the end of 1935. The three were able to team up together at the internment camp where, as Kraushaar subsequently recalled, Wosikowski, a committed sportswoman, organised other internees to become more physically active whether they liked it or not. Their stay in the camp was brief, however, as by the end of June 1940 the three had escaped to Toulouse. In November 1943 Kraushaar moved her own base to Marseille, continuing her work for the German Communist Party in exile as a contributor to a newspaper entitled "Unser Vaterland". During 1944/45, with the German occupation forces being pushed out of France, she was mandated by CALPO to undertake "antifascist" political work with German POWs.

The war ended, formally in May 1945, and Kraushaar returned to the Soviet occupation zone in what remained of Germany. In December 1945 she relocated to Hamburg in the British occupation zone. With the postwar division of Germany becoming progressively more pronounced, in May 1947 she moved back into the Soviet zone, working until 1952 as an instructor in the "central secretariat" of the newly formed Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands / SED), which, after October 1949, became the ruling party of a new German dictatorship, ruled separately from the three western occupation zones. She subsequently worked for a long time as a consultant with the East German Culture Ministry. In 1958 she became a researcher with the Central Party Archive and at the party's Marxism–Leninism Institute. Her research work and the party publications resulting from it focused on Germany's anti-fascist resistance movement during the Hitler years. She retired in December 1985.

Awards and honours 1969 Patriotic Order of Merit 1980 Patriotic Order of Merit Gold clasp