Anna Sophie Marie Auguste Behrend was born in Penzlin, a small town in the flat marshy countryside to the west of Stettin.
She read with growing attention about preparations being made for the SPD national party conference which in 1904 was to be held in Bremen at the Casino Hall at the harbour.
[1] It was still three years before the lifting of the ban on female participation in politics, but in 1905 she nevertheless began to involve herself in the unofficial SPD women's group that had been set up in Blumenthal.
[1] One of her worst days in the Bremen parliament came in 1932 when, as the assembly's longest serving member, she found herself obliged to follow the rules and accept the election of a National Socialist president of the chamber.
Sources differ over the duration of the prison sentence that she received, but in any event, she remained in detention for between ten and eleven of the twelve Nazi years.
[1][2] Steigler was consigned to the Women's Prison in Lübeck where fellow inmates, convicted on the same charge as she, included Hermine Berthold and the Bremen communist resistance activist Käthe Popall.
[2] When her prison term ended, probably in December 1939 a few months after the outbreak of the Second World War, Stiegler was transferred into "protective custody" at the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Afterwards she spoke little about her Ravensbrück experiences until her eightieth birthday, when she shared some of her memories: she recalled that conditions in the concentration camp had been significantly harsher than they had been in the prison.
She herself recalled that it was because of the strength of her politically grounded conviction that in the end good would triumph over evil, that she was able to endure the concentration camp life more robustly than others, as a result of which she was able to provide support and comfort to fellow inmates.
[1] The context was one in which the Soviet army was invading Germany from the east and the German authorities had decided, for various reasons, to empty the concentration camps before the foreign forces arrived, a decision which in the case of Ravensbrück was implemented between 27 April and 3 May 1945.
Fellow founding committee members included Agnes Heineken, Anna Klara Fischer, Käthe Popall and Irmgard Enderle.
[1] Returning to themes on which she had spoken out during the Weimar years, Stiegler campaigned for relaxation of the abortion laws (§ 118 StGB), advocating free access to contraception and modern effective methods for protecting vulnerable girls.
[1] Mention should also be made of less eulogistic assessments, indicating that towards the end of her life she was not always accommodating to younger colleagues whose approach or tactics might not align unquestioningly with her own, however.
[2] Anna Stiegler died in Bremen on 23 June 1963, a greatly admired and respected doyenne of social democracy in the region and, to some extent, nationally.