Maria Wachter

Maria Wachter (21 April 1910 – 18 August 2010) was a political activist (KPD) who resisted Nazism both before and after 1933. She spent most of the twelve Nazi years in exile or detained in camps and prisons. She was asked in 2010 if she was proud, on the occasion of her hundredth birthday, to be among the last survivors of those who had resisted the Nazis. Evidently she was not, but she was proud to have been a member of the Communist Party for nearly eighty years.

Life Family provenance Maria Wachter was born in Düsseldorf. Her father had been a Social Democratic activist as a young man, described by his daughter as an "outspoken revolutionary", but in 1914 he was conscripted into the army. He survived the First World War, but with his political spirit broken. To his daughter's growing bewilderment as she grew up, and then to her enduring regret, his priority became to avoid losing his job with the city power supply company. Maria Wachter joined the Communist Party in 1930. On 26 January 1932, when Adolf Hitler, as leader of the opposition Nazi Party, came to present his programme to 300 Düsseldorf industry and bank chiefs at a meeting of the Düsseldorf Industrial Society, Wachter was one of the many demonstrators who gathered in front of the prestigious Parkhotel chanting "Wer Hitler wählt, wählt den Krieg" ("Voters for Hitler are voting for another war"). and Heinrich Wiatrek ("Fritz Weber"), both of whom had returned from Moscow, equipped with their party pseudonyms, the previous year. Her party work involved frequent train journeys into Germany, crossing the frontier at Emmerich. This, armed with her false identity papers, was particularly stressful. However, she followed up on a comrade's advice, making sure she always had a piece of bread and butter with her. On reaching the frontier she would slowly unwrap it and begin to eat. When the door to the train compartment burst open and the frontier policeman, accompanied by an SS colleague, asked to see her passport, she was able to pass it to him casually, while concentrating on her simple meal, thus avoiding exchanging looks with the officials and at the same time calming her own nerves. It always worked. she was accommodated in a succession of 13 (as she later recalled) prisons, ending up back in Düsseldorf where she underwent extensive interrogation by the Gestapo.

After the war War ended, formally, in May 1945. Düsseldorf and the surrounding region now formed part of the British occupation zone, which in May 1949 would be merged with US and French occupation zones to be relaunched as the German Federal Republic (Bundesreuplik Deutschland / BRD / West Germany). Maria Wachter was released. She took a secretarial job in Düsseldorf and renewed her membership of the Communist Party. However, with the intensification of Cold War tensions that followed the 1953 uprising in East Germany and accompanied Soviet military intervention in Hungary in 1956, in August 1956 the West German Constitutional Court banned the Communist Party. Wachter was briefly taken into "investigative custody" in Neuss, but was not charged or convicted. The German Communist Party was relaunched in 1968 as a "new" party with a (slightly) new name, and from some of her utterances it appears that Wachter lost no time in (re)joining it.

Wachter was still aged only 35 when the war ended. She became known as a survivor of Nazi persecution. For many years she worked full-time in Frankfurt at the West German office of the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime ("Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes" / VVN) and its successor organisation, eventually becoming its honorary president for North Rhine-Westphalia. Even in old age she continued lecturing to school classes and events about her years opposing the Nazi régime.

She was a co-founder of the "warning-memorial" ("Mahn- und Gedenkstätte") opened in 1987 in Düsseldorf to commemorate Nazi victims. Wachter's continuing uncomplicated commitment to Communism meant that she remained controversial with much of the political mainstream, however. In September 2008 the Düsseldorf council rejected a move to make her an honorary citizen of the city. The proposition was supported only by councillors from Die Linke ("The Left" party). The Greens and one Social Democrat abstained in the vote the turned down the idea.