[1] After 1945 she became a member of the Central Party Control Commission of the SED (Zentrale Parteikontrollkommission / ZPKK) in the Soviet occupation zone (from 1949 the German Democratic Republic), identified as a "true Stalinist" and feared on account of her interrogation methods.
[2] The eldest of her parents' six recorded children, Herta Geffke was born in Bollinken [de] (Frauendorf) on the north side of Stettin, at that time in Pomerania.
[5] In March 1921 the party appointed her regional "women's secretary" for the politically and economically important Lower Rhine and Ruhr districts in the west of the country.
[3] After her marriage broke up in 1928 there were further political differences with party comrades and she offered her services to "Red Aid", the Communist-sponsored international welfare organisation.
[1] The political backdrop was transformed in January 1933 when the Nazi Party took power in Germany and lost little time in converting the country into a one-party dictatorship.
Herta Geffke continued to pursue her (now illegal) political activities, working for "Red Aid" in the Hessen-Frankfurt region from March 1933 and in the Ruhr district further to the north.
[3] Between June 1945 and March 1946, she was in charge of the regional youth department (Landesjugendamt [de] for the newly (and at this point temporarily) created state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
[1] On the national stage within the Soviet occupation zone, from March 1948 to May 1949, Geffke was a member of the People's Council ("Deutscher Volksrat"), an appointed chamber mandated to develop and endorse the proposed constitution drawn up by the SED (party).
[1] This meant that, working alongside Hermann Matern,[1] she was responsible for keeping the party cleansed "of enemy and degenerate elements" ("von feindlichen und entarteten Elementen")[8] during the 1950s.
A specific investigation which she headed up, and which quickly acquired fame and/or notoriety, was the special ZPKK commission, starting in November 1949, to check out the contacts of party members with the US born spy Noel Field.
One source describes her in the role as "the archetypal harsh and uncompromising Stalinist functionary" ("der Prototyp einer bedingungslosen und harten stalinistischen Funktionärin").
[3] Contemporaries who encountered her during the course of the Noel Field investigations recall interrogation sessions lasting many hours, conducted without signs of any significant emotional engagement.
[3] In October 1958, the year of her sixty-fifth birthday, she was removed from the ZPKK and took on the top job in the personnel department ("Kaderabteilung") at the party central committee's Akademie für Gesellschaftswissenschaften beim ZK der SED [de] (Institute for Social Sciences).