Margarete Buber-Neumann

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Margarete Buber-Neumann (21 October 1901 - 6 November 1989), was a leading member of the Communist Party of Germany during the years of the Weimar Republic. She survived imprisonment in both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

Buber-Neumann was born Margarete Thüring in Potsdam, and in her youth was active in socialist youth organisations. After World War I she became more radical and joined the newly founded German Communist Party (KPD). In 1922 she married Rafael Buber, communist son of the philosopher Martin Buber, who was Jewish. They had two daughters. Following her divorce in 1929, she married again, to the leading German Communist Heinz Neumann. When the Nazis came to power in 1939, the Neumanns went into exile in the Soviet Union. During the 1930s they both worked for the Comintern, first in France and then in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

In 1937 Heinz Neumann was arrested in Moscow as part of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, and later executed. Margarete never learned of his exact fate. She was arrested and sent to a labour camp in Siberia as a "wife of an enemy of the people." Following the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, she was one of a number of German Communists handed over in 1940 by the Soviets to Nazi Germany.

Buber-Neumann was then imprisoned in Ravensbrück concentration camp. Because she had renounced communism as a result of her experiences in the Soviet Union, she was treated as a relatively privileged prisoner, which enabled her to survive five years in the camp. She worked in a clerical capacity in the Siemens plant attached to the camp, and later as secretary to a camp official, SS-Oberaufseherin Johanna Langefeld. Nevertheless, along with all other prisoners, she endured hunger, cold weather, disease, vermin, corporal punishment and periods of solitary confinement in complete darkness. She was freed in April 1945.

After World War II Buber-Neumann spent some years in Sweden, returning to Germany in the 1950s. In 1948 she published Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler ("Prisoners of Stalin and Hitler"), an account of her years in the Soviet and Nazi camps, which aroused the bitter hostility of the Soviet and German communists. In 1949 she testified in Paris in support of Victor Kravchenko, who was suing a magazine connected with the French Communist Party for libel after he was accused of fabricating his account of Soviet labour camps. Buber-Neumann corroborated Kravchenko's account in great detail, contributing to his victory in the case.^[1]

In 1957 Buber-Neumann published Von Potsdam nach Moskau: Stationen eines Irrweges ("From Potsdam to Moscow: Stations of an Erring Way"). In 1976 she published Die erloschene Flamme: Schicksale meiner Zeit ("The Extinct Flame: Fates of my Time"), in which she argued that Nazism and Communism were in practice the same. By this time had become a political conservative, joining the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1975.

In 1980 Buber-Neumann was awarded the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. She died in Frankfurt am Main in 1989. Her daughters by her marriage to Rafael Buber settled in Israel after the war.