[2] After the city's foundation in 1792 many thousands of ethnic Germans settled in Odessa, notably during the first decade of the nineteenth century, in order to escape the impact of the Napoleonic Wars.
[1] The family moved to Riga in 1911 where Lisa, still only 11, found work in a textiles and garments factory while her younger brother attended the local elementary school.
In 1917 the SPD split over the issue of backing for the war, with the left-wing breakaway anti-war group taking the name Independent Social Democratic Party (" Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / USPD).
By this time, after more than a year characterised by a wave of revolutions, especially in the cities and towns, as suddenly discharged soldiers returned home to acute economic hardship, socialist politics were undergoing further reconfiguration.
Within the USPD Ullrich was one of those actively pushing for a merger with the Communist Party which had been launched in Berlin, formally, at a congress held between 30 December 1918 and 1 January 1919.
[2] That objective was achieved in January 1920, after which she was a Communist Party member, undertaking various unpaid functions, politically active primarily among the women industrial workers in the Moabit quarter of Berlin.
In August 1930 she was back in Moscow where she took part in the Fifth Congress of the Profintern (Red International of Trades Unions / "Красный интернационал профсоюзов").
[1] Sources differ as to the precise date of Ullrich's arrest, but it appears that she was detained in Magdeburg in July 1934, to be charged with "preparing high treason" ("Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat").
[2] She faced trial in the Berlin district court on 20 January 1935 and was sentenced to a three-year prison term (of which more than half a year had already been served while in investigatory detention).
[9] In the summer of 1938 the concentration camp received a visit from Heinrich Himmler, a senior and energetic member of the government whose responsibilities extended over a remarkably wide range of domestic administrative matters.
Those selected included the wife of Mattach Wallek, a prominent trades union leader before 1933, and other wives of men known to Himmler, presumably, on account of their political activities in the past.
During the "meeting" Himmler pointed out at some length how the Nazis had struggled to make life better for working people, and as details of the economic progress made by the country since 1933 were rehearsed the Communists were obliged to agree about many examples of improved living standards.
The discussion even got to the point where Ullrich ventured that if the Nazis were acting out the agenda of the Communist Party so assiduously, then it was not clear why she and her comrades had spent up to six years in a concentration camp.
Ullrich stated that she had not asked for a doctor, but from the expressions on the faces of passing comrades and their raised fists it appeared they knew something that she did not.
[2] It was only after August 1939, when some (though by no means all) of the details emerged of the astonishing non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, which the government had been negotiating since April, that Ullrich arrived at an appreciation that her release in May, and that of several other comrades with good connections in Moscow, had been part of a diplomatic scene-setting exercise by Himmler, intended to show the Soviets that the Nazi government was softening its line, just a little, on Germany's own communist activists.
She also received instructions and information that came from Moscow for onward transmission to party comrades operating "underground" in Berlin, which she could translate where necessary and give to her sisters, who were not as closely observed by the authorities as she was, to be passed on beyond the walls of the little house.
As the battered Nazi authorities rushed to clear the concentration camps ahead of the advancing Soviet and allied forces, women held at Ravensbrück were sent off on a so-called death march.
[2][9] Between May 1945 and October 1949 an area corresponding to approximately the central third of what had been Germany, including the regions surrounding Berlin, would be administered as the Soviet occupation zone.
As a fluent Russian speaker with political credentials that had suddenly become impeccable, Lisa Ullrich was one of the first to find herself appointed to public office.
[1] She moved on from the Grünau mayoral position to a role with the National Administration for Labour and Welfare, playing a leading part in the government's "Rescue the Children!"
[2] In 1948 she undertook a six-month training at the party's Karl Marx Academy in Berlin, after which she was involved till 1964 with the Instruction Department at the national administration for the "Machinery Rental Stations" ("Maschinenausleihstation" / MAS) within what became after 1951 the East German Ministry for Forestry and Agriculture.
Farm machinery was not owned by or permanently assigned to any individual co-operative, but centrally controlled and rented out according to seasonal requirements, which meant that the MAS was a critical component in the overall economy of food production.