Lotte Ulbricht (1903–2002)

Lotte Ulbricht was born Charlotte Kühn in the Rixdorf district of Berlin, Germany, the daughter of an unskilled laborer. At age 16, she had to leave school to work and became an office worker and a shorthand typist. She also joined the youth movement of the German Communist Party (KPD). From 1921, she did secretarial work work for the KPD, and spent the year 1922-1923 with the Communist Youth International in Moscow. On her return to Germany, she worked for the KPD group in the German Reichstag before taking employment with the Soviet trade delegation in Berlin from 1927 to 1931. By the time the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933, she and her first husband, Erich Wendt, were living in Moscow. There she became an instructor with the Comintern and studied at Moscow State University. Wendt was arrested by the Soviet secret police during the Stalinist purges in 1936; she divorced him but was also investigated. She remained under official Party reprimand until 1938. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, life became easier for her and she was active in the German émigré community in Moscow. She worked as a compositor at a foreign language printer, and later for the central committee (Comintern) of the Communist Party. She went back to Germany after the end of World War II, and became a personal assistant to Walter Ulbricht, a Communist politician whom she knew from their time in Moscow. The couple married in 1953. She gave up working for him and began studying at the Institute for Social Sciences, which awarded her a diploma in 1959. Ulbricht became the virtual dictator of East Germany in 1953 as part of post-war Soviet domination, and she edited his speeches and writings and served on a number of commissions and committees until his death in 1973. She was much feted by the state and party leadership of East Germany, receiving the Fatherland Order of Merit, the Order of Karl Marx, and the Grand Star of Friendship of Nations.