Roberta Gropper

Roberta Gropper (16 August 1897 - 1 February 1993) was a German Communist political activist who became a member of the Reichstag (national parliament) in 1930.

[1] In 1934 she fled to the Soviet Union where she fell victim to party factionalism and spent more than three years in a concentration camp: this was followed by a Siberian exile.

At the end of 1927, with her husband, she moved to Mannheim, joining the party's regional leadership team for the Rhenish Palatinate.

In June 1929 she moved to Berlin, working as a typist in the large permanent Soviet Trade Delegation and in the Information Department of the German Communist Party.

The period was one of continuing factionalism within the German Communist Party, which directly mirrored the power struggle that had been unfolding in Moscow during which Stalin was able to remove opponents from positions of influence.

[4] The political backdrop changed dramatically in January 1933 when the Nazis took power and converted Germany into a one-party dictatorship.

[5] Roberta Gropper continued to work, now illegally, for the Communist Party in Germany till May 1934, when she emigrated to Paris, using the cover name "Paula Brenner".

This referred to her association five years earlier with Neumann and Remmele which was newly relevant since they, too, had ended up as political refugees in Moscow where they fell victim to the dictator's paranoia.

The book contains an interesting insight involving Gropper, who was asked by her friend whether they should tell people abroad what was going on in the Soviet Union once they were released.

On her release, Roberta Gropper took work as a proofreader with the "Red Flag" newspaper in the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

The DFD was an officially mandated "mass organisation" which, under the Leninist constitutional structure being applied, would receive a predetermined fixed quota of seats in the National parliament (Volkskammer).