Ruth Fischer (December 11, 1895 – March 13, 1961) was a German Communist, a co-founder of the Austrian Communist Party in 1918. According to secret information declassified in 2010, she was a key agent of the American intelligence service known as "The Pond."
Contents |
Born in Leipzig, Ruth Fischer was the daughter of the Austrian philosopher, Rudolf Eisler and elder sister to noted film and concert composer Hanns Eisler and fellow communist activist Gerhart Eisler. She studied philosophy, economics and politics in Vienna. She moved to Berlin in 1919 and she was a leader of the Communist Party of Germany from 1924 to 1925. Espousing left-wing positions, she was a member of the Reichsrat from 1924-1928. She fled to Paris in 1933 and then to the USA in 1941. In the late 1940's, she testified before the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee against her brother, Hanns, resulting in his blacklisting and deportation back to Germany. She also testified that her other brother, Gerhart, was a major Communist agent. The Communist press denounced her as a "German Trotskyite." She propounded critical views of Stalinism and called for a rebirth of Communism after Stalin's death. Before this period of anti-Stalinism, however, she was instrumental in the rise to power of the Triumvirs (Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev), viciously denouncing Trotsky at the fifth congress of the Communist International. Isaac Deutscher, the noted biographer of Trotsky and Stalin, described her as a "young, trumpet-tongued woman, without any revolutionary experience or merit, yet idolized by the Communists of Berlin."[1] In 1955 she returned to Paris and published her books Stalin and German Communism and Die Umformung der Sowjetgesellschaft.
For eight years, Fischer, code-named "Alice Miller," was a key agent for "The Pond".[2]