Lilly Becher

Lilly Becher (née Korpus, 27 January 1901, Nuremberg – 20 September 1978, Berlin) was a German writer, journalist and communist activist.

She moved to Vienna in 1933, the year of Hitler's assumption of power in Germany, remaining for a year before moving to work for the Éditions du Carrefour publishing firm in Paris, where she helped publicize and document the plight of German Jews under her homeland's Nazi regime in Éditions du Carrefour's 1936 collection Der Gelbe Fleck: die Ausrottung von 500000 dt.

After meeting and marrying Johannes R. Becher, a revolutionary poet and fellow refugee from the Nazis in Paris, the two moved to the Soviet Union, living there until 1945.

Lilly Becher worked as head editor of the Neuen Berliner Illustrierten, a major East German weekly magazine, from 1945 until 1950.

Johannes Becher composed the lyrics to the German Democratic Republic's national anthem, Auferstanden aus Ruinen, during the same period.