Ruth Oesterreich (6 June 1894 - 25 June 1943) was a German activist-politician (KPD) who became involved, after 1933, in anti-government activism and Swiss-funded child welfare work among German political refugees. She was executed by hanging.
Life
The politics of youth
Anna Ruth Erna Oesterreich was born into a Protestant family in Dresden. Her father was employed as a plumber's assistant. She was involved in socialist politics from an early age, joining the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1912 and working in a secretarial position with the editorial office at the Dresdner Volkszeitung (SPD regional newspaper). During the war years, on 1 May 1916, she participated in a large anti-war demonstration organised in Berlin by the Marxist anti-militarist "Spartakusbund". Later that year, on 16 November 1916, she married Otto Hermann Jensen, described as "a writer from Hanover". The marriage record shows that Jensen had an eye problem as a result of which he was not able to sign the marriage agreement. Although records indicate that she had been born a Protestant, at the time of her marriage Oesterreich identified herself as a "religious dissident", indicating an absence of religious belief and exemption from liability to pay church taxes. The couple were divorced two years later. In 1919 Oesterreich joined the newly launched Communist Party, remaining a member of it until 1928/29. In 1925 she took a job with the implausibly large Soviet Trade Bureau for Western Europe in Berlin. By this time she had married her second husband, Jakob Reich, a senior member of the Communist Party and a somewhat shadowy figure, identified in some sources as the head of the Soviet West European Trade Bureau in Berlin and/or, since 1921, the secret head of the Comintern in Western Europe. (There is likely to have been significant overlap between the two organisations.) The marriage was a second marriage for both Ruth and Jakob: it was followed in 1924 by the birth of their daughter, also called Ruth.
Communist Party official
Party ructions in Moscow that followed the death of Lenin resonated powerfully with comrades in Berlin. As early as 1925 Jakob Reich found himself summoned to Moscow to explain his actions, following a falling out with Comintern Budget Commissar Osip Piatnitsky over use of Comintern funds. His wife seems to have remained in her post at the Soviet Trade Bureau in Berlin until 1929, however, at which point the German Communist Party split. Both Reich and Oesterreich left the mainstream party, which had been taken over by Ernst Thälmann and other Stalinist hardliners. Oesterreich was opposed to the "Social fascism" political approach favoured by the Comintern leadership of the time and joined the break-away so-called "Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Opposition)" / KPDO, intended in the first instance not as an alternative political party, but as an organised movement within the Communist Party. Others who transferred to it, and in doing so found they had been excluded from the Communist Party, included many of the intellectual heavy-weights who had taken a lead in establishing the Communist Party in the earlier p[art of the decade. Heinrich Brandler, Jacob Walcher, Paul Frölich and August Thalheimer were among them. Members believed that instead of branding Social Democrats as "Social Fascists", the best hope for Germany to achieve a socialist future would be for reasonable communists to try and work in political coalition with the mainstream political centre-left. Oesterreich undertook management and administrative responsibilities in the quasi-party's publishing co-operative, which briefly produced a daily newspaper. The KPDO lingered on until 1939, but as early as 1929 it underwent a first serious split of its own. A substantial minority of members, including Ruth Oesterreich, teamed up with disillusioned members of the SPD to try and form a broadly-based antifascist political coalition. The result was the Socialist Workers' Party (SAPD), of which Oesterreich remained a member until 1934.
Hitler and exile
1933 was a year of political change in Germany, during the first part of which the country was transformed into a one-party dictatorship. Probably in February or March 1933, Oesterreich and Reich - whom the authorities classified as Jewish - emigrated to Prague together with their small daughter, and taking a route shared by thousands of others with a record of left-wing political activism during the years of the German democracy.