Litzi Friedmann

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Litzi Friedman, born Alice Kohlmann in Vienna in 1910, was an Austrian Communist of Jewish origins who was the first wife of Kim Philby ^[1].

Kohlmann was first married at the age of 18 but was divorced a little over a year later. By the time that Philby arrived in Vienna in 1933 she was a member of the Communist party who had been imprisoned in 1932 for a few weeks. When, in February 1934, the Austrian government started a crackdown on known leftists, she and Philby believed that she would be a target. So, on February 24, she and Philby married in Vienna. In ^[2], Philby's last wife, Rufina, quotes another author, who she calls Brown (this is probably Anthony Cave Brown), as saying that Teddy Kollek was at the wedding -- in any event, more than twenty years later, Kollek recognized Philby at CIA headquarters.

In April 1934, after the collapse of the Socialist movement in Vienna, they left for London, arriving there in May. Friedman had a friend in London who was already working for Soviet intelligence, the Vienna-born photographer Edith Tudor-Hart. One biographer of Philby, Genrikh Borovik, who has had access to the Soviet archives, says that Tudor-Hart recommended Friedman and Philby as suitable candidates for NKVD recruitment ^[3].

Friedman and Philby split up in the 1930s -- some sources claim it was because Philby had to distance himself from known communists in order to penetrate the British establishment. However, they remained in contact for years afterwards and were divorced only in 1946. After the war, Friedman and the German-Jewish refugee, Georg Honigmann, went to live in East Berlin in 1947, where Honigmann became editor of the Berliner Zeitung. Friedman and Honigmann had a daughter, Barbara Honigmann, in 1949 and split up shortly after.

Barbara Honigmann has written a biography of her mother ^[4] -- see an English-language review

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