[3] Eleonore "Lore" Staimer, the youngest of her parents' three recorded children, was born in Bremen, one of Germany's largest port cities, at a time of accelerating social and political change, driven by rapid industrial and commercial expansion.
[2] While still at school Elenore Pieck attended a succession of business college evening classes, undertaking courses in shorthand, typing, and book-keeping.
[2] She moved on to work as secretary-assistant to Gustav Menzel, a left-leaning lawyer who since 1921 had served as one of 31 communist members in the 421 seat Prussian Landtag (parliament).
[2] 1930 brought a change of direction, when Eleanore Pieck went to work for the (implausibly large) Soviet trade mission in Berlin.
By the end of February 1933 it was clear that known Communist Party activist members were at particular risk of enhanced surveillance by the security services, targeted government persecution and worse.
[4]) By 1934 Eleanore Pieck was working as a typing assistant with the "Comintern Youth" organisation and the "Internationaler Revolutionärer Theaterbund", which had been set up a few years earlier by her brother.
[2][7][8] Many of the political refugees from Germany who had settled in Moscow during the 1930s in order to get away from Hitler, and then been evacuated with the native Muscovites in 1941, were left in their remote places of exile for years.
Others joined the hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war who had survived monumental military defeat at Stalingrad, only to end up in the Soviet camps.
[2] Eleonore Springer returned to Germany on 28 May 1945 accompanied by fellow activist Margarete Lode (1902–1952), who subsequently became her sister-in-law, marrying Arthur Pieck in November 1945.
She moved at once to Stettin, at the north-eastern end of the Soviet occupation zone, where she stayed for a couple of months, undertaking various political jobs.
On 5 July 1945 the military occupation forces choreographed the transfer of Stettin from the Soviet zone of Germany to Poland, triggering another bout of ethnic cleansing in the process.
Till August 1945 Elenore remained in the north of the Soviet occupation zone, now based in Schwerin, and a member of the party leadership team ("KPD-Landesleitung") for the newly established state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
This brought her closer to the centre of political power under the highly centralised Leninist government structure that had emerged by 1949 in what had become a new kind of German one-party dictatorship.
During the 1960s a slow and tentative rapprochement began, however, and in October 1966 Eleonore Staimer became East Germany's first ever ambassador to Yugoslavia, remaining in the post till February 1969.
[2] She retired in 1975, following which she became actively engaged as a member of the Berlin committee of Anti-fascist resistance fighters, a heavily politicised patriotic-nationalistic organisation with close links to the ruling party.