Anna Tieke (born Anna Wittenburg: 11 November 1898 - 15 January 1938) was a German communist. With her family she relocated to the Soviet Union in 1931. On 15 January 1938 Anna Tieke and her son Rudolf, identified as "suspected German spies", were shot and killed in Leningrad. Formal "rehabilitation" came posthumously, in 1956.
Provenance and early years
Anna Wittenburg was born in Berlin, the daughter of a carpenter. After leaving school she became a clerk. She was also politically engaged, joining the Young Socialists ("Arbeiter-Jugend") in 1911. To judge from the birth dates of their children, it was around 1915 that she married Rudolf Tieke (1895 – 1989), a gardener who later took work in the chemicals industry. During the 1920s his political activities and affiliations were broadly similar to hers. Between 1917 and 1922 she was a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party ("Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / USPD) which had broken away from the mainstream Social Democratic Party in 1917, primarily because of rejection of the decision of the party leadership to operate what amounted to a parliamentary truce over funding for the war.
Political activism in Berlin
Anna Tieke's three children were born in 1916, 1918 and 1921. From 1925 she was a member of the Communist Party, listed as a party official in the Women's Department of the Berlin-South sub-region ("Frauenabteilung des Berliner Unter Bezirk Süd"). She was also a member of the Red Front Women's and Girls' League ("Rote Frauen und Mädchenbund" / RFMB) and of the Anti-Militarist Military Policy Department ("Antimilitaristische Apparat Abteilung Militärpolitik") which is thought to have been a cover designation for the Communist Party's intelligence service.
Emigration to the Soviet Union
In October 1931 Rudolf and Anna Tieke and their three children relocated from Berlin to the Soviet Union. They were motivated, it seems, by political idealism. "It is fantastic here" ("Es ist herrlich hier"), wrote Anna Tieke to her parents, left behind in Berlin, in a letter dated 6 November 1931. By this time the Tieke family were settled with other German emigrants, creating the "Spartak" production commune in Khosta (Хосте), along the Black Sea coast to the south of Krasnodar. A year later disaster struck in the form a massive famine across (and beyond) the entire Caucasus region. Historians still argue over how far the famine resulted from natural causes - primarily drought - and how far it reflected political and logistical failures caused by government implementation of enforced collectivisation. The widespread death from starvation was in any case real enough. The Tiekes narrowly avoided death by starvation thanks to the Comintern which managed to arrange their return to Moscow.
Their idealism seems to have been undiminished by their horrendous experiences: they remained convinced that one day the new socialist society would become reality, and they were determined to play their part in making it happen. While their teenage sons, Rudolf and Günter, were sent to a "practical school" ("Berufsschule") in Moscow, by 1935 Rudolf and Anna Tieke had moved with their daughter Ursula to Leningrad where they made their home. They lived in a large shared apartment building at Detskaya ulitsa 3. The building in which they lived was a so-called "Community House" which the city authorities had made available to accommodate foreign families, professional workers and political exiles from across Europe. Almost 100 families and unattached individuals lived in it.
Rudolf Tieke worked as a machinist at a factory in the city while Anna Tieke worked as a seamstress at a children's home. Their daughter Ursula attended the "German school" locally. The boys concluded their training in Moscow and joined their parents in Leningrad, taking work locally, so that by 1937 the family were reunited.