Roberta Gropper

Roberta Gropper (16 August 1897 - 1 February 1993) was a German Communist political activist who became a member of the Reichstag (national parliament) in 1930. In 1934 she fled to the Soviet Union where she fell victim to party factionalism and spent more than three years in a concentration camp: this was followed by a Siberian exile. She was able to return to Berlin in 1947 and became a mainstream politician in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

Life

Early years Roberta Gropper was born in Memmingen, a mid-sized town in the hills to the south of Ulm. Her father was a weaver. In 1905 the family moved to Ulm, and it was here than between 1911 and 1924 Roberta Gropper was employed in a cigarette factory. In 1915 she joined a worker's youth (Arbeiterjugend) organisation, and became a member of a trades union in 1918. The political backdrop changed dramatically in January 1933 when the Nazis took power and converted Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Political activity (except in support of the Nazi party) became illegal. Her husband was arrested on 1 March 1933, and spent the next year or so in "protective custody".

Moscow In Moscow Gropper worked for the Workers International Relief (Internationale Arbeiterhilfe) welfare organisation. She received a further blow, however, in May 1935 when her husband died. For a period after this Roberta Gropper was without work. She then took work as a contributing editor. However, in November 1937 she was arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to three and a half years in a concentration camp. Frequent politically motivated arrests were a feature of life in Moscow at this time. Gropper's crime was membership of an "anti-Soviet grouping". This referred to her association five years earlier with Neumann and Remmele which was newly relevant since they, too, had ended up as political refugees in Moscow where they fell victim to the dictator's paranoia. (Hermann Neumann was sentenced to death and shot on 26 November 1937: Hermann Remmele would meet the same fate on 7 March 1939. ) One of Gropper's fellow internees in the concentration camp was a comrade from the past, Margarete Buber-Neumann, now a widow, who also survived the camp experience, and later wrote a memoire of life in the camp entitled Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler ("As prisoners of Stalin and Hitler"). The book contains an interesting insight involving Gropper, who was asked by her friend whether they should tell people abroad what was going on in the Soviet Union once they were released. Gropper replied that it was their duty not to do that: "you should on no account rob the workers of their illusions nor of their hope!" ("...das unsere Pflicht sei«, sagte Gropper: »Um Gottes willen, tue das nicht! Du darfst den Arbeitern nicht ihre Illusionen, nicht ihre Hoffnung rauben!«"). 1967 Patriotic Order of Merit in gold