Only four were women (and one of those, Margot Honecker, was married to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party - the leader of the country).
[1] They left China in 1930 and returned to the west: there was a four-month stop-over in Moscow before they settled in Berlin, where she worked for the local party in the Köpenick quarter of the city between 1930 and 1932.
Elisabeth Zaisser would spend Germany's twelve Nazi years living in the Soviet Union, supporting herself with a succession of teaching jobs.
In 1938 she took over for a year as head of the Department of German Philology at the Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages in Gorky (as Nizhny Novgorod had been renamed in 1932).
Along with her work for the Central Committee, between 1941 and 1942, and again from 1944 till 1947, she was in charge of the graduate-level courses at the Red Army's "Military Institute for Foreign Languages".
[1][2] War ended in May 1945, leaving the large central portion of Germany surrounding Berlin administered as the Soviet occupation zone.
[1] In October 1949 Zaisser switched to the "TH Dresden" (as that institution was known at that time), appointed "Professor of Soviet Pedagogical Methodology for Russian Teaching" ("Professorin für Sowjetpädagogik und Methodik des Russisch-Unterrichts").
Early April 1953 it was reported that she had led a high level East German government delegation to Budapest in order to take part in the Hungarian National Day celebrations.
[9] Her ministerial resignation was justified, officially, with the explanation that she had been applying her experiences of the school system in the Soviet Union without appropriately adapting them for East German conditions.
It was part of Wilhelm Zaisser's dramatic fall from grace in the vicious power struggles that broke out in the wake of the June uprising.
[1][2][6] In December 1953 Elizabeth Zaisser was given the status of one persecuted by the Nazi régime ("Verfolgter des Naziregimes" / VdN), which qualified her for a small supplementary pension.