Maria Wiedmaier

Maria Wiedmaier (born Maria Siegloch: 19 October 1896 – 20 October 1977) was a German political activist (KPD) who engaged in anti-fascist resistance during the twelve Nazi years. She spent most of that time in a succession of state detention institutions, ending the war as a survivor from the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Life Family provenance and early years Maria Siegloch was born in Zuffenhausen, a quarter of Stuttgart on the city's north side. The third of her parents' seven recorded children, she was born into a "railway family". Between 1910 and 1916 she worked at the Salamander shoe factory in nearby Kornwestheim. Meanwhile, war broke out in 1914, and from 1916 she was working at a munitions factory in Feuerbach. It was here that she met Albert Volz, a co-worker whom she married that same year. she was a co-founder, in 1923, of the Communist Party's Zuffenhausen branch.

Soviet occupation zone / German Democratic Republic With the end of the war, formally in May 1945, Maria Wiedmeier was freed from the concentration camp. Surrounding Berlin, a large region of what had been Germany was now administered as the Soviet occupation zone (after October 1949 relaunched as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic). Between 1945 and 1949 she worked in the social services department in Berlin's Charlottenburg quarter. After the division of the city administration she became an employee of the Council (Magistrat) of East Berlin. In 1948 she received a formal reprimand on account of "deficiencies in the cooperation of the VVN and the SED".

She then settled back in East Germany where she married , a Buchenwald survivor who at one stage became General Secretary of the VVN.

In 1976 she was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit (gold clasp) having already received lower levels of the award in 1958 and 1971.

Maria Wiedmeier died on 20 December 1977 in Glienicke near Potsdam.