Maria Blum

Maria Blum (born Maria Holl: 27 October 1890 - 11 May 1965) was a German politician (KPD). Between November 1932 and February/March 1933 she sat as a member of the national parliament (Reichstag), representing Electoral District 12 (Thüringia).

Life Maria Holl was born at Schwabmünchen, a small town in the hills south of Augsburg. Slightly unusually for the time, according to her later entry in the official handbook of Reichgstag members, the family were not members of the church. They worked from home, making brooms and brushes. She attended school locally and then took a series of jobs locally, including work as an embroidery trainer and as a maid-servant on a farm. Next she moved to Munich where she took a job as a sales assistant.

The result of the November 1932 election left the Nazis and the Communists together holding 296 Reichstag seats, which was more than 50% of the seat total of 584. The more moderate parties, even if they had been able to form a coalition between themselves, could not have commanded a parliamentary majority without co-operation from one or other of the extreme parties. Despite the parliamentary stalemate, following deft political machinations the Nazis, with the conditional agreement of President Hindenburg, took power in January 1933 and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Following the Reichstag fire at the end of February 1933, which was blamed on "communists" with implausible haste, the authorities were particularly ferocious in attacking communist activists. Maria Blum continued her (now illegal) political work till June 1933 at which point she was arrested. She suffered serious abuse, but by the end of that year she had been released: she emigrated to Moscow.

In Moscow, between 1934 and 1936, using the party name "Maria Herbst", she studied at the so-called 'West University'. In 1937 she started teaching at evening classes for exiled German workers, and from 1938 she was working in an "Emigrant Home" . In June 1941 the Berlin government turned its back on the non-aggression pact with Moscow and launched a massive land invasion of the Soviet Union. Several thousand German political refugees who had been living in Moscow were unceremoniously sent into internal exile. Maria Blum was exiled to Tomsk in Western Siberia. She was able to return to Germany only in August 1947.

A large part of central Germany was administered, after May 1945, as the Soviet occupation zone. It would be relaunched in October 1949 as the German Democratic Republic. It was here, still using her Soviet party name, Maria Herbst, that she settled. She lost no time in joining the recently launched Socialist Unity Party (SED), by now well on its way to becoming the ruling party in East Germany. She spent several months as a patient in a sanatorium and then, in January 1948, took a job with the newly converted party academy near Schwerin at Castle Wiligrad. Between 1954 and 1958 she was employed at the party's Marxism-Leninism Institute in Berlin, where she was entrusted with care of the important literary estate of Ernst Thälmann.

Maria Blum (Herbst) died on 11 May 1965 in East Berlin.