Leopold Bauer (born Eliezer Lippa Ben Jossip David ha Cohen: 18 December 1912 – 18 September 1972) was a German political activist and journalist, originally from Galicia.

Then in October 1955, he was released to West Germany in the context of a general agreement between the governments in Bonn and Moscow for the return of surviving German prisoners of war.

[1][2][3] Leopold Bauer was born in Skalat, a small town in Eastern Galicia which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

[1] During the second half of the nineteenth century the population of Skalat had been boosted by the arrival of large numbers of Jews seeking to escape the pogroms taking place in the western territories of Russia.

[1] At school, while still only fourteen, Bauer was influenced by a teacher who was a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to join the Young Socialists ("Sozialistische Arbeiter-Jugend") in 1927.

The period was one of renewed economic austerity and intensifying political polarisation: Bauer quickly became involved in the confrontations that the organised labour movement was facing.

[1] His situation changed swiftly after the Hitler government took power in January 1933 and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship.

[1] In December 1933, using the cover name "Rudolf Katz", he emigrated to Prague from where, with other comrades, he was ordered by the party leadership to move on in February 1934 to Paris.

[3] After the Munich Agreement Leo Bauer was sent back to Prague where, again using the pseudonym "Rudolf Katz" he played a central role in organsising the evacuation of German Communist Party cadres to England.

[10] The meetings evidently came to the attention of the Swiss authorities, and on 27 October 1942 the bank clerk and espionage suspect Paul-Eric Perret (as Leo Bauer was still known in this context) was arrested at his Geneva home.

[1] He appears to have spent his time in investigatory detention and several subsequent months in the Saint-Antoine prison, after which he was moved to the Bassecourt internment camp, recently created for "political detainees".

[1][11] In May 1944 he secured early release from the internment camp at Bassecourt, albeit subject to post-release conditions and monitoring (Aufbewahrungspflicht.

[1] He also became secretary to the Centrale sanitaire suisse (CSS), a medical welfare organisation originally set up seven years earlier to help ("internationalist" anti-Franco) victims of the Spanish Civil War.

Elections were held in December 1946 and Leo Bauer became one of the ten Communist Party members in the state parliament ("Landtag").

In October 1947, while driving to one of these meetings, he was involved in a serious traffic accident near Eisenach and, according to one source, obliged to remain in the Soviet occupation zone between 1947 and 1949 in order to recover.

[1][3][12] In 1949 Leo Bauer became editor-in-chief of Deutschlandsender, a radio station transmitting from the eastern (i.e. Soviet-occupied) part of central Berlin.

A new long wave transmitter had been installed in 1947 in order to extend the reach of a service committed to the "ideological rearmament" ("ideologische Aufrüstung") of the western occupation zones.

Bauer found himself on the receiving end of pointed criticisms from the increasingly powerful Party Central Committee, both with respect to his political views and regarding his lifestyle choices.

Bauer was inclined to dismiss this as the result of "petty intruge" ("kleinliche Intrige") orchestrated by Walter Ulbricht, and refused to appreciate the dangers he faced.

He was certainly not inclined to see evil in The Party, which he still saw as "the only path to a meaningful life" ("der einzige Weg zu einem sinnvollen Leben ").

[3] Sources are not fully consistent as to the date of Bauer's trial; but it appears to have been on 28 December 1952 that he was convicted by a Soviet military tribunal and, identified as an "American spy", sentenced to death by shooting.

In June 1953, in what was subsequently presented as an official act of mercy ("eine Begnadigung"), a twenty-five-year term in a labour camp in eastern Siberia was substituted.

The new First Party Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, was keen to reach out to foreign governments so as to try and improve the Soviet Union's international standing.

In September 1955, following several months of "behind the scenes diplomacy", Chancellor Adenauer visited Moscow in order to agree the return home of the surviving German detainees still being held in the Soviet Union.

[16][17] Negotiations involved slightly under 10,000 prisoners of war who had arrived as members of Hitler's invading armies during the early 1940s and approximately 20,000 German civilians, many of whom had arrived as political refugees and fallen foul of Stalin's purges or been imprisoned in the atmosphere of intensified paranoia that took hold in the Soviet Union following the German invasion of 1941.

This was the country to which Leo Bauer now returned, settling in Frankfurt am Main and launching himself on a new career as a "political educator" and journalist.

[1][3] During the middle 1960s, Leopold Bauer joined the circle of advisors around Willy Brandt, who in 1964 had succeeded the recently deceased Erich Ollenhauer as leader of the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD).

[13] Brandt was a deeply compassionate man who also bought to their friendship an acute appreciation of the extent to which Bauer had suffered during his life.

He advised, principally, on East-West German relations ("Ostpolitik") at a time when the governments on both sides of the internal border were keen to regularise various pieces of unfinished business which had persisted since 1949.

Rumour persisted that Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski regarded Bauer's constant closeness to the chancellor as a threat to his own position of trust as the party's "chief executive" ("Parteigeschäftsführer").