Carola Neher

An ardent supporter of the KPD, the German communist party, Neher left Germany shortly after the Nazi took over and emigrated to Prague, then to Moscow where she appeared on the stage as a cabaret artiste. In the spring of 1936, Anatol Becker, Neher's husband -also an ardent communist, was arrested and imprisoned on charges of "Terrorist Activities". He was accused of planning an assassination attempt on the person of Soviet leader, Josef Stalin. Following his incarceration, Carola Neher relentlessly searched for him, going from prison to prison trying to trace his whereabouts. This was a very perilous activity given that she was herself under surveillance by the Secret Police. In her secret file, recently found in the KGB archives, she was already branded as an "adventuress with anti-soviet sympathies", which at the time equated to a death sentence by the Moskow regime. She was finally arrested and sent to prison a few months later. She endured exceptionally harsh treatment there and tried to commit suicide by slashing her wrists. After several weeks of interrogation and torture, she was condemned to 10 years hard labour in a gulag as "Trotkyst spy and conspirator", whilst Becker was shot in front of a firing squad. Several of her long-time friends, amongst them Bertold Brecht tried to help her but to no avail. Neher was sent to Oryol, an internment camp for political dissidents where other prominent Trotkysts like Christian Rakovsky, Maria Spiridonova and Olga Kameneva were also imprisoned. Very few details are available about Carola Neher afterwards. As of March 1941, we know that she was still alive: A letter she sent to the orphanage, where her 7-year old son Georg had been sent, survived. In the letter she inquires about his health and whether he still remembered her. We also know that she was not one of the 160 prominent political prisoners shot in Oryol during the Stalin purges of September 1941. When the camp was occupied by the advancing German army in October 1941, all German citizens interned in Soviet gulags were handed over to the Gestapo. As a communist, Neher was then charged with High Treason and evacuated East. The convoy arrived in the town of Ilezk near Orienburg (present-day Kazakhstan) in June 1942, where she was interned in the local prison. Following an outbreak of typhus (the prison had no sanitary installations of any sort), the already weak 41-year old Carola Neher (prisoner number 59783) died there on 26th July 1942. Her body was buried in an unmarked mass grave. Her son George, became a music teacher and only found out about his parents' identity in 1975.