Eugenia (Genia) Nobel (December 13, 1912 – August 7, 1999) was a communist and German Jew who fled to Shanghai during the Second World War.
[5] Shanghai's unique lack of visa regulations meant that it was a "port of last resort" for those like the Nobels who needed to emigrate but had little money and no international connections.
[7] The Nobles were among 18,000 Jewish refugees who entered Shanghai in the late 1930s, part of the 175 million people displaced worldwide during the Second World War.
[13] Following their arrival in Shanghai, they joined a communist group led by Johannes König (later East Germany's first ambassador to the PRC).
Between September 1941 and 1947, Genia Nobel was among the group members who carried out the German-language programming for the Soviet TASS radio station XRVN.
[18] Most Jews in Shanghai were not communists, and Nobel's activities alienated her and her fellow group members from the larger body of refugees.
Epidemics like typhoid, dysentery, tuberculosis, and meningitis laid waste to the generally malnourished people, claiming many victims."
Genia Nobel recalled that material conditions improved at this time, there were a greater number of work opportunities, and it became easier for her KPD group to meet.
[29] In 1945, Nobel took a leading role in founding and operating an advocacy group called Gemeinschaft der demokratischen Deutschen in Schanghai (Association of Democratic Germans in Shanghai) to help all non-fascist refugees who wanted to return home to Germany.
[31] On July 25, 1947, the refugees, including the Nobels, boarded the Marine Lynx, an American troop transport vessel.
[34] Genia first worked for the Berlin City Council, then as an editor for Neues Deutschland, the official party newspaper of the SED.
She later took on an important position as a contributing editor at the journal Einheit, which was the premier venue for presenting SED policy and ideology.
Günter was hired by a friend at the SED's state representative committee (Landesvorstand), in the commerce and industry division (Sektion Wirtschaft).
[38] The questions asked during his interrogation reveal how little the SED understood about the situation of Jews under the Nazis and about the Nobels' emigration to Shanghai.
Throughout the GDR's existence, Genia Nobel's professional priorities in East Germany meant that her engagement with China vacillated with the GDR-PRC relationship.
[44] Reflecting the shift, Nobel co-authored a 1964 article accusing the PRC of "great-power chauvinism," an accusation the CCP frequently lobbed at the U.S.S.R.[45] Mao Zedong's death in 1976 ushered in a period of ambiguity following years of hostile GDR-PRC relations,[46] and it was during this time that Nobel broke her quarter-century-long silence on her experience as a refugee, which previously had been politically dangerous to discuss.
[49] The historian Chen Jian has noted that "the 'reform and opening' process meant that China would no longer behave as a revolutionary country internationally.
This change, in turn, symbolized the beginning of a critical transition in China's evolution from an outsider to an insider in the existing international system.
"[50] This transition paved the way for warmer GDR-PRC relations, and by the late 1980s, Nobel was involved with organizations such as the Freundschaftskomittee DDR-China and the China research department of the SED Central Committee's Institut für Internationale Arbeiterbewegung.
[51] Their story resonated with new concerns about Holocaust remembrance, participatory citizenship, and civil courage in reunited Germany; gone was any reference to anti-Zionism.