On 15 January 1938 Anna Tieke and her son Rudolf, identified as "suspected German spies", were shot and killed in Leningrad.
She was also a member of the Red Front Women's and Girls' League ("Rote Frauen und Mädchenbund" / RFMB) and of the Anti-Militarist Military Policy Department ("Antimilitaristische Apparat Abteilung Militärpolitik") which is thought to have been a cover designation for the Communist Party's intelligence service.
"It is fantastic here" ("Es ist herrlich hier"), wrote Anna Tieke to her parents, left behind in Berlin, in a letter dated 6 November 1931.
[3] By this time the Tieke family were settled with other German emigrants, creating the "Spartak" production commune in Khosta (Хосте), along the Black Sea coast to the south of Krasnodar.
[3] Their idealism seems to have been undiminished by their horrendous experiences: they remained convinced that one day the new socialist society would become reality, and they were determined to play their part in making it happen.
The building in which they lived was a so-called "Community House" which the city authorities had made available to accommodate foreign families, professional workers and political exiles from across Europe.
[2] The boys concluded their training in Moscow and joined their parents in Leningrad, taking work locally, so that by 1937 the family were reunited.
[3] Meanwhile, the leader's belief - not entirely unjustified - that he was surrounded in the Kremlin by comrades who might not think him the best man for the job developed into acute personal paranoia.
The foreign-born inhabitants of a "Community House" in Leningrad became vulnerable to official suspicion which became a widespread purge of the politically involved.
He was not permitted to read the records of the interrogation but, threatened with torture, he was nevertheless forced to sign an absurd confession to "membership of an anti-Soviet espionage organisation", to "terrorist spying on behalf of Germany" and to planning assassinations of leading party and national leaders of the Soviet Union.
Based on Rudolf Tieke's so-called confession the investigation ended, without witnesses, without charges, without a judge, and without involvement of any defence or other lawyers.
Later, in 1955, the Soviet security services informed Rudolf Tieke that his wife had been sentenced in 1938 to spend ten years in a labour camp where she had died on 10 July 1942.
[2] By this time Ursula had acquired a husband of her own in the person of Meier Schwartz, a former Gulag inmate originally from Romania: the couple had two children.
The grounds stated in 1955 were that the witnesses in what they now described as Rudolf Teike's original trial had themselves now been declared not guilty, so that he himself had been incorrectly charged and sentenced.
[2] It has subsequently been determined that the woods surrounding Levashovo, some 30 km / 18 miles to the north of central St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) contain mass graves in which the remains of around 47,000 people, murdered between 1937 and 1954 were placed.
[2] They are among 28 men and women identified in the mass graves who were originally arrested while living at the "Community House" at Detskaya ulitsa 3, falsely charged and then killed, but posthumously rehabilitated.