Carola Neher(1900-1942)
- Actress
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.
