When she was four, her parents, relocating against the overwhelming east-west tide of central European migration during the 1950s, took her to live in East Berlin.

[2] Gerhard Leo (1923 – 2009), her father, was a Jewish journalist originally from Berlin who had escaped Nazi Germany and spent the war years as a Résistance fighter in France.

[3] She had always wanted to become a journalist, but now she hated it: "... party hacks and burned out security service employees ... people who put on a jacket to walk down the corridor".

[15] Here she worked on the oral history project "Politisch-gesellschaftlicher Wandel im Geschichtsbewusstsein von Arbeitnehmern in den alten und neuen Bundesländern" (loosely, "social and political change in historical awareness of workers in the old and new federal states (i.e. in former West Germany and former East Germany))".

[16] In 2006, Leo became a research associate at the Historical Institute of the University of Jena, where for some years she also held a teaching chair.

In 1991, Annette Leo published "Briefe zwischen Kommen und Gehen", a biography of Dagobert Lubinski, her maternal grandfather who had been a communist journalist and a resistance fighter.

[17] In 2008, Annette Leo received the Annalise Wagner Prize for a piece of work she produced on daily life in the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp at Fürstenberg during the Hitler years.

[14][18] In 2012 her biography of Erwin Strittmatter (1912 – 1994) triggered a widespread debate on the author's historical role as one of the most popular novelists in the German Democratic Republic.

A heavily politicised version of the story from the perspective of Zweig (who has subsequently achieved a measure of notability on his own account as an author and cameraman[22]) was already familiar to many German readers, cinema goers and television audiences thanks to the success of the 1958 East German novel Naked Among Wolves which has been adapted for the big screen and (at least twice) for the small screen, but until Annette Leo produced her documentary, the story of the boys who were murdered was unknown.