Trude Richter (born Erna Johanna Marie Barnick in Magdeburg 19 November 1899 – died Leipzig 4 January 1989[1]) was a writer, literary scholar and teacher who became a political activist.
She attended an academically focused school in Danzig and then trained to become a teacher, taking a teaching job in 1919 on the island of Poel, a short distance along the coast to the east of Hamburg.
She undertook further teacher training during 1924–1926 emerging with a full qualification for teaching German Studies and History at academic secondary level.
[2] She began to use the name "Trude Richter" for her contributions to the Frankfurt "Workers' Newspaper" ("Arbeiterzeitung") in order to be able to continue with her teaching work, in respect of which she was a state employee.
[7] Richter's partner, Hans Günther, also found himself taken to the Kolyma region, but died from Typhus on 10 November 1938 in a transit camp at Vladivostok.
On 23 August 1949 she was rearrested, her party membership ban was again invoked, and she was deported to Ust-Omchug which was the Gulag administrative centre for the Tenka rehabilitation camps.
[5] Between 1950 and 1953 she was given work playing the piano in the culture club and taught foreign languages as part of an adult education programme.
Her formal political rehabilitation by the Soviet Supreme Court was completed in 1956/57 after the well-regarded German writers Anna Seghers and Johannes Becher had intervened on her behalf.
It was also with the help of Ann Seghers that she was permitted to leave Magadan and, after an absence of more than twenty years, return to what had been central Germany and had by now become the German Democratic Republic where she started a new life in the south of the new country, in Leipzig.