Published for little over a decade, the newspaper ceased publication in 1939 after Soviet secret police (NKVD) arrested so many of the staff that it no longer had enough people to continue operation.

[4] In December 1935, the DZZ published reports from the Rote Hilfe about Sachsenburg concentration camp, with specific information about names and numbers, including how many prisoners there were in different categories.

[5] Other writers included German workers who emigrated to the Soviet Union for work, rather than political reasons and non-Germans, such as William L. Patterson, who wrote an article about Paul Robeson in 1936.

[7] As the Great Purge heated up, on 9 August 1936, the DZZ followed the Soviet press in its drumbeat against "enemy infiltrators".

[1] There was a new editor-in-chief, Karl Hoffmann, who, as a defensive measure, made the editorial staff live at the DZZ offices and were not allowed to leave.

[1] More staff were hired, but they were inadequate to the task, possessing only moderate German skills, unable to write and unschooled in journalism.

[11] Others connected with the DZZ who were arrested in the Great Purge include Wehner,[12] Maria Osten, Mikhail Koltsov, Ernst Ottwalt,[13] Hermann, Richter, Stürmann,[1] Franz Falk, an editor and Karl Filippovich Kurshner, an editor-in-chief,[14] and Knodt, who was arrested in December 1940, and perished in a gulag.