Anna Leibbrand (2 May 1902 – 24 July 1972) was a left-wing German political activist and writer.
She left Germany in 1933 to escape the Nazi regime, but twenty years later, after returning to Germany was arrested and for several years imprisoned, in the aftermath of the Noel Field espionage affair.
She was married three times and accordingly may appear in sources under any one of the following four names: Anna Wiedemann Anna Leibbrand Anna von Fischer (Anna Josephine Fischer as the author of Hinter den sieben Bergen (1945)) Anna Schlotterbeck
Life
Anna Wiedemann was born in Munich where her father worked as a printer, and where she attended elementary school, after which she moved to a School of Mechanical Engineering in Esslingen, emerging in the third year of the war, 1917, with a qualification in Technical Drawing. She then took a job as a graphic artist and typist with Robert Bosch GmbH in Stuttgart-Feuerbach.
1918 was the year of her sixteenth birthday and it was the year when she joined the Socialist Young Workers Association and the Free Socialist Youth Organisation. It was also the year of German defeat in the First World War, which was followed by many months of national and regional revolution. She participated in the Spartacus League's battles in Stuttgart that took place between November 1918 and January 1919. In 1924 she became a member of the recently established German Communist Party, becoming a member of the party's youth wing leadership for the regional parties in Königsberg, Danzig, Halle and for Berlin itself.
In 1923 she had married Robert Leibbrand, a leading Party Official from Stuttgart. By 1927 they were living in Moscow where she worked for the Comintern as a typist till 1929. When the couple returned to Berlin in 1929 Anna Leibbrand became the party women's section head for the Berlin-Brandenburg district. She was also working as an editor on a party newspaper called "Die Arbeiterin" (literally "The [female] Worker"). Until 1933 she also sat on the district council.
In January 1933 the NSDAP (Nazi Party) took power and lost little time in switching to one- party government in Germany. All political parties (other than the Nazi Party) were now illegal, but the new Chancellor had, in opposition, been particularly vitriolic about the Communist Party. Anna and Robert Leibbrand nevertheless continued with their (now illegal) party work. On 24 March 1933 Robert Leibbrand was arrested: he would spend most of the twelve Nazi years in a succession of jails and concentration camps. Anna had not been with her husband when he was arrested and she continued with her own party work till July 1933. In September 1933, however, she emigrated to Switzerland where she took work as a domestic servant. She immediately joined the Swiss Communist Party, remaining a member of it and of its successor party till 1948. After a couple of years she obtained a job as a doctor's assistant. In 1938 Anna and Robert Leibbrand were divorced and in 1939 she married her employer, the doctor Hans von Fischer also, in the process, taking Swiss citizenship.
It was also during this time that, together with Hans von Fischer, she set up in Zurich the "Centrale Sanitaire Internationale", a left-wing medical charity initially intended to provide medical support to fighters in the Spanish Civil War. She also undertook illegal work for the Italian Communist Party at this time. Switzerland's neutral status during the Second World War enabled Anna von Fischer to work with left-leaning political and medical support organisations in various countries both during and directly after the war. War ended, formally in May 1945, but at the direction of the German senior Communist, Franz Dahlem, she remained in Switzerland for a further three years. Her contacts during the 1940s included Noel Field, a leading member of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, a disaster relief and refugee support organisation with close US links. In 1946 she warned the Party leadership in what would later be East Germany that Noel Field was an alleged agent of the US security services.
