Maria Osten

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Maria Osten was a German journalist most famous for her 1935 book "Hubert in Wonderland" ("Губерт в стране чудес" - Russian) and the events surrounding its publication in the Soviet Union. The story is about a 12 year-old boy who is the son of German Communist from the Saar region of Germany. The boy is adopted by a Soviet journalist for Pravda, Mikhail Koltsov, and his partner, the German journalist Maria Osten, who took the boy in 1935 to the Soviet Union. The boy's arrival in the Soviet Union was a very highly publicized event at the time, as it was a demonstration of the cooperation of fellow Communists to save a young boy from having to grow up in fascist Germany. The boy was toured all around the country and he was even taken to visit Marshals Tukhachevsky and Budyonny in the Kremlin.

The family's fate, however, changed, when Stalin began to purge the party ranks. Koltsov was arrested in January 1939 and executed thirteen months later, and the book disappeared from circulation. Hubert then refused to recognize his adoptive parents and told his adoptive mother to leave him. In 1941, Maria Osten was arrested in the hotel "Balchug," and never heard from again. Hubert was deported to Kazakh SSR, where he became a shepard. He was arrested in 1946 and freed only in 1955, two years after Stalin's death. Hubert tried to return to Germany, but never succeeded, dying in 1959 in a hospital Simferopol after a poorly performed operation for appendicitis.