Lotte Bergtel-Schleif

Elly Lotte Bergtel-Schleif, née Schleif (born 4 July 1903 in Lichterfelde; died 26 February 1965 in East Berlin),[1] was a German librarian who was actively involved in the resistance against Nazis while a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

Between 1933 and 1937 Bergtel-Schleif worked on a commission of the Association of German Librarians to establish binding rules for alphabetical cataloguing.

[3] In 1930, Schleif met the librarian and sinologist Philipp Schaeffer while in a conference[4] and the philologist Heinrich Scheel, who visited her library.

In spring 1933 she became a member of the KPD,[5] through which she met John Sieg who ran a group of communists and sympathizers in Neukölln.

Through Sieg she met Herbert Grasse and Otto Grabowski along with Willi Gurklies, Franz Knippenberg and Ludwig Marmulla.

[6] Through Sieg, Bergtel-Schleif was introduced to Arvid Harnack who was part of the German resistance group that would later be called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr.

The award should be given to work that is characterized by the “creative application of Marxism-Leninism ” and that contributes to the “solution of key tasks in library and information science research”.