In view of his Jewish provenance and communist politics, he was obliged to escape the country during 1933, and while living in Moscow was formally deprived, in absentia, of his German citizenship in 1939.
[1][2] Franz Leschnitzer was born into a family of Jewish intellectuals in Posen, which at the time of his birth (and indeed till 1920) was part of Germany.
[3] Franz had an elder brother, Adolf Leschnitzer, who would emigrate to New York where for twenty years he was employed as a professor at the "City College".
[2][4] The extent to which Leschnitzer combined his Berlin student career with work as a political journalist is remarkable, even by the standards of those times.
[1] Details of his university degree are unclear, but in 1930 Leschnitzer was officially blocked from sitting his national Level 1 Law Exams "on political grounds".
At the end of 1930 he joined "Internationale Arbeiter-Hilfe" (IAH), a Berlin-based "international workers' welfare organisation", widely (and correctly) believed to have close links to the Soviet leadership.
[1] Meanwhile, the intensifying political polarisation, which had been driven by the widespread austerity and record levels of unemployment that had followed in the Great Depression after the Wall Street crash, was seeping into the structures of government.
[1] During March 1933, in the immediate aftermath of the Reichstag Fire, people with known communist connections were singled out by the government and its agencies for demonisation.
It is reported that during March 1933 Leschnitzer was the target of three separate official investigations, and that month he escaped to Vienna which, before 1938, remained beyond the direct control of the German government.
[1] Between 1933 and 1938 Czechoslovakia rapidly became a place of refuge for a large number of political refugees from Hitler's Germany, with a particular focus on Prague.
Franz Leschnitzer was one of the first to contribute to "Der Gegen-Angriff", a newly launched fortnightly newspaper produced by and for German exiles.
By the end of May 1933 he was in the Soviet Union where he would live for more than a quarter of a century, surviving in peace and war through a succession of sometimes dramatic political and social shifts.
Moscow, like Prague, had a growing population of German refugees, driven from their homes by some combination of politics and race, and a corresponding number of opportunities were appearing for German-language journalism.
As early as June 1933 Leschnitzer obtained an editorial position with the German-language pages of "Internationale Literatur", a publication to which he remained an important contributor, under editor in chief Johannes R. Becher (who had arrived in Moscow a few weeks earlier), until 1941.
[4] During 1933/34 he also worked as a teacher at the Karl Liebknecht School, which had opened in Moscow in 1924 for the children of German-speaking emigrants and refugees (and would close in 1939 in the context of the so-called "Great purge").
Two years later, in 1936, the semi-official comment that a German language "Literary-Historical Reading Book" for school use which he had compiled jointly with Jolan Kelen-Fried was underpinned by "vulgar sociological tendencies" served as a salutary reminder that published work in Moscow could always be subjected to a certain level of ill-defined and unpredictable supervision.
[4][12] Between February 1942 and April 1943 Leschnitzer was employed as a teacher at the foreign languages division of the "Military Academy of Armoured Troops" ("Военная Академия Бронетанковых Войск"), a prestigious army college for mechanised and motorised warfare - notably involving the use of tanks - which had also relocated from Moscow to Tashkent.
[1] "Neues Leben" was a newspaper in the German language written for young people, production of which was transferred from Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung to Pravda in 1957.
Its target readership presumably included large numbers of German men who had been captured as conscript soldiers before 1945 and then prevented from returning Germany.
[4] In 1940, having evidently broken with Hildegard, Franz Leschnitzer entered briefly into a fictitious marriage with Josephine Stapenhorst after the arrest of her husband, the physician Adolf Boss (1902–1942).