Friedel Apelt (1 November 1902 - 12 December 2001) was a German political activist, trades union official and politician (KPD/SED). During the Nazi years she participated actively in anti-fascist resistance, and spent much of the time in prison or as a concentration camp internee. After the war she was able to resume her political career in the Soviet occupation zone (relaunched, in October 1949, as the German Democratic Republic).
During a long political career she was married three times, and she may be identified in sources by any one of four names. Before her first marriage she was Frieda (or Friedel) Raddünz. After her first marriage, in 1925, she became Friedel Franz. Between 1946 and 1952 she was Friedel Malter. She retained her final name, Friedel Apelt, for nearly fifty years, between 1952 and 2001.
Life
Provenance and early years
Frieda Anna Charlotte Raddünz was born in Breslau. Her father worked as a typesetter. She attended middle school locally and then worked as a weaver and homeworker, initially still in Breslau between 1917 and 1923, and again between 1927 and 1930. During or before 1925 she appears to have been living in the village of Wüstewaltersdorf, some 80 km / 50 miles to the southwest of Breslau.
Friedel Franz
She married Adolf Franz, a miner, in 1925. He was a local Communist Party leader. In 1925 Friedel Franz joined the Textile Workers' Trades Union ("Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband" / DTV), remaining a member till her exclusion from it in 1929. She was also a works council member between 1927 and 1930. In 1926 she joined the Communist Party, becoming a member of the party's Breslau based regional leadership team ("Bezirksleitung") for Silesia, with special responsibility, between 1930 and 1933, for women's issues. As political tensions rose across Germany, in 1929 she became a member of the Revolutionary Union Opposition ("Revolutionäre Gewerkschafts Opposition" / RGO) movement.
Between 1926 and 1933 Friedel Franz sat as a member of the Provincial parliament ("Landtag") for Lower Silesia. During the later 1920s she was also, for a period, a member of the district council for Waldenburg. In 1931 she became a member of the Prussian Provincial parliament ("Landtag") itself, joining between elections, presumably filling a seat vacated through the departure of another Communist Party member. She was the youngest of the party's 31 Prussian Landtag members. In the 1932 election she was re-elected. She was not re-elected in the election of March 1933 (in which the NSDAP party obtained an overall majority, and following which the Communist Party members were in any event not permitted to take their seats). The Prussian Landtag held its final session just two months later, in May 1933.
Régime change in January 1933 heralded a rapid transition to one-party dictatorship. Work for the communist part became illegal: Friedel Franz pursued her illegal political work. In June 1933 she was arrested because of her political activity. On 15 August 1934 she faced the special "People's Court" and was sentenced to three years in prison, convicted in respect of the standard charge of "preparing to commit high treason" ("Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat"). She served her three-year prison sentence in Jauer before being transferred to the concentration camps at Moringen and then Lichtenburg where she spent a further two years in "protective custody". In 1938 she was released, and during 1938/39 she was working with the Edeka grocery stores co-operative. Around this time she and her husband were divorced. Adolf Franz fled to Moscow where it is thought he died of Typhus in 1942. By 1944 Friedel Franz had moved back to Breslau and was undertaking office work.
The 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler failed in its objective, but succeeded in persuading the government of heightened terrorist risks on the home front. A plan was therefore dusted down which involved arresting a large number of people who had been active as politicians before the Nazi takeover. The official lists were not entirely up to date, many of the names on them belonging to people who had fled abroad or died, but on the night of 22/23 August 1944 approximately 4,000 people who had been politically active before 1933 (and survived inside Nazi Germany since) were arrested. Friedel Franz was among them, in the context of what came to be known as Aktion Gitter: she was transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp.