Ilse Stöbe

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Ilse Stöbe

Ilse Frieda Gertrud Stöbe (17 May 1911 – 22 December 1942) was a German journalist and anti-Nazi resistance fighter. She was born and died in Berlin.[1][2]

Life

Ilse Stöbe grew up in a working-class home in Berlin. Stöbe was the only daughter of carpenter Max Stöbe and his wife Frieda (née Schumann). She had an eight-year-older half-brother from her mother's first marriage, Kurt Müller. She grew up in Mainzer Straße 1 in Lichtenberg, Berlin[3] There is little information about their youth.[4]

Stöbe attended a trade school to learn a profession as a shorthand typist. After school, she was first employed in the publishing house of Rudolf Mosse and then worked as secretary to the journalist and writer Theodor Wolff in the Berliner Tageblatt. There she met Rudolf Herrnstadt, to whom she would later become engaged.[5]

In 1929, Stöbe joined the

National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party) and in mid-1934 was appointed Cultural Attaché of the Nazi party's foreign office in Poland.[citation needed
]

According to Helmut Kindler, she remained in contact with him as her childhood friend.[6] During the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Stöbe met the Swiss publisher Rudolf Huber, who left her a major part of his fortune in his will when he died in 1940.[7]

Shortly before the German invasion of Poland, she returned to Berlin from Warsaw and worked in the information department of the Foreign Office. There she met the journalist Carl Helfrich, with whom she lived until her arrest in 1942. According to her will, he was the tenant of her flat in Ahornallee 48 in Charlottenburg, Berlin.[8]

Career

Initially, from 1930, Stöbe was a member of the reconnaissance group of Rudolf Herrnstadt, where he was listed under the name of Friedrich Brockmann, and from that time began to volunteer for Soviet intelligence under the pseudonym Arbin. In Soviet intelligence, Stöbe received the pseudonym "Arnim". During Herrnstadt's trip to Prague in 1930, she began to work directly with the Soviet resident in Berlin, Yakov Bronin, who was introduced to her as "Dr. Bosch."[9]

Gerhard Kegel, who was an employee of the Foreign Office in Berlin from 1935 to 1943, supported Stöbe in her clandestine intelligence activities after returning from Poland.[10] She allegedly continued this activity until her arrest in 1942.[11]

Stöbe was arrested on 12 September 1942 by the Gestapo, allegedly for spying for the Soviet Union and for membership of the Red Orchestra (Die Rote Kapelle). A Gestapo report of November 1942, stated a radio message from the Soviet Union informed that a parachuted resistance fighter would come to her address. After seven weeks of torture she was compelled to confess to conspiratorial connections to the Soviet secret service and to people such as Rudolf von Scheliha.[12] He was arrested on 12 October 1942. Both were sentenced to death for treason on 14 December 1942 by the Reichskriegsgericht, and executed on 22 December 1942 in the Plötzensee Prison in Berlin, she by guillotine and he by hanging from a meathook. The Soviet agent, Heinrich Koenen, who had landed in Germany by parachute, was arrested at her house by a waiting Gestapo official. Her mother was also arrested and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died in 1943.[13] Stöbe's brother Kurt Müller was able to escape arrest and continue his resistance activities with the resistance group, the European Union Resistance. He was murdered in June 1944.[14]

Stöbe (code name "Alta") repeatedly sent warning messages to the Soviet Union about the impending German invasion of the Soviet Union well in advance of the attack.[15]

Awards and honours

She was the only woman to be featured on a special coin issued by the East German Ministry of State (Stasi) to commemorate important spies in Communist service during the war. The Ilse Stöbe Vocational School in Market Street, Berlin is named in her honour. [16]

In July, 2014, Germany's Foreign Ministry honoured Ilse Stöbe for her actions against the Nazis.[17]

Literature

Memorial plaque, Frankfurter Allee 233, in Lichtenberg, Berlin

Witnesses

  • Wolff, Theodor (1937). Die Schwimmerin. Ein Roman aus der Gegenwart [The swimmer. A novel from the present.]. Zürich.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  • Gerhard, Kegel (1984). In den Stürmen unseres Jahrhunderts : ein deutscher Kommunist über sein ungewöhnliches Leben [In the storms of the century: a German Communist about his unusual life] (3rd ed.). Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
    ISBN 3-320-00609-6
    .
  • Helmut, Kindler (1992). Zum Abschied ein Fest : die Autobiographie eines deutschen Verlegers [To leave one party: the autobiography of a German publisher]. Munich: Droemer Knaur.
    ISBN 3-426-75042-2
    .

Biographical-historical

Historical environment

References

  1. ISBN 978-0-8108-6320-0
    . Retrieved 5 January 2019.
  2. ^ "Ilse Stöbe". Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand (in German). German Resistance Memorial Center. Retrieved 23 February 2018.
  3. ISBN 978-3-86153-003-9
    . Retrieved 21 April 2019.
  4. ISBN 978-3-89468-110-4
    . Retrieved 21 April 2019.
  5. ISBN 978-3-89468-110-4
    . Retrieved 21 April 2019.
  6. ISBN 978-3-688-10642-4
    . Retrieved 21 April 2019.
  7. ISBN 9783894681104
    .
  8. ISBN 978-3-89468-110-4
    . Retrieved 21 April 2019.
  9. ISBN 978-3-531-12306-6
    , retrieved 2021-12-10
  10. ISBN 3-320-00609-6
    .
  11. ISBN 978-3-86153-003-9
    . Retrieved 21 April 2019.
  12. ISBN 0-89093-203-4
    .
  13. ^ Woermann, Heinrich-Wilhelm (1991). Widerstand in Charlottenburg (PDF) (in German). Vol. 5 (2nd updated ed.). Berlin. p. 133. Retrieved 21 April 2019.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  14. ISBN 978-3-89468-110-4
    . Retrieved 21 April 2019.
  15. ^ Article in the Spiegel Online English edition by Klaus Wiegrefe, 2013-10-01
  16. ISBN 978-3-86153-003-9
    . Retrieved 21 April 2019.
  17. ^ Article in the Belfast Telegraph, 2014-7-20
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