Gitta Bauer (born 1919 in

Berlin Berlin is Capital of Germany, the capital and largest city of Germany, both by area and List of cities in Germany by population, by population. Its more than 3.85 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European U ...

, died 1990) was a German journalist.

Opposing Nazism

She was born into a liberal family and raised a Catholic. She was a member of a Catholic movement, that was banned by the Nazis in 1935. Some years later, she was sent to prison for publishing a small newspaper with six friends, that advocated peace. In 1944, her childhood friend, Ilse Baumgart, who was half Jewish and lived in Berlin under an assumed identity, where she worked as a secretary, got into great trouble. Upon hearing of the

20 July plot On 20 July 1944, Claus von Stauffenberg and other conspirators attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Führer of Nazi Germany, inside his Wolf's Lair field headquarters near Rastenburg, East Prussia, now Kętrzyn, in present-day Poland. Th ...

, she asked "Is the swine (Hitler) dead? Then the war is finally over". Her comment was reported, but the officer who came to arrest her was himself opposed to the Nazis, and gave her 15 minutes to escape. She was then hidden for the next nine months in the home of Gitta Bauer. Bauer later recounted: "This was no big moral or religious decision. She was a friend and she needed help. We knew it was dangerous, and we were careful, but we didn't consider not taking her". In 1984 Gitta Bauer was honored as a "

Righteous among the Nations Righteous Among the Nations ( he, חֲסִידֵי אֻמּוֹת הָעוֹלָם, ; "righteous (plural) of the world's nations") is an honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to s ...

" by

Yad Vashem Yad Vashem ( he, יָד וַשֵׁם; literally, "a memorial and a name") is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered; honoring Jews who fought against th ...

for saving her friend. She was initially in doubt about accepting the honor, not feeling she did anything extraordinary, but eventually she did.

Opposing communism

In 1945, she met her husband, Leo Bauer (1912–1972), a Jewish communist veteran. In 1950 their son was born in East Berlin. The same year Leo Bauer was arrested together with his wife Gitta and his sister-in-law Hilde Dubro (who happened to visit them at the time) by the communist regime, accused of being an American spy, and sent to a

Gulag The Gulag, an acronym for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the State Political Directorate, GPU was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= ...

concentration camp in

Siberia Siberia ( ; rus, Сибирь, r=Sibir', p=sʲɪˈbʲirʲ, a=Ru-Сибирь.ogg) is an extensive geographical region, constituting all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has been a part o ...

. Gitta Bauer was imprisoned by the

Stasi The Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the (),An abbreviation of . was the state security service of the East Germany from 1950 to 1990. The Stasi's function was similar to the KGB, serving as a means of maintaining state author ...

for circa 3 years, first at

Bautzen Bautzen () or Budyšin () is a hill-top town in eastern Saxony, Germany, and the administrative centre of the district of Bautzen. It is located on the Spree river. In 2018 the town's population was 39,087. Until 1868, its German name was ''Bu ...

and then at the Waldheim women's prison. Following her release, she became an ardent

anti-communist Anti-communism is political and ideological opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in the Russian Empire, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when the United States and th ...

, escaping to

West Germany West Germany is the colloquial term used to indicate the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; german: Bundesrepublik Deutschland , BRD) between its formation on 23 May 1949 and the German reunification through the accession of East Germany on 3 O ...

, where she worked as a journalist for the

Springer Springer or springers may refer to: Publishers * Springer Science+Business Media, aka Springer International Publishing, a worldwide publishing group founded in 1842 in Germany formerly known as Springer-Verlag. ** Springer Nature, a multinationa ...

Foreign News Service. She was joined in West Germany by her husband, who became a social democrat and a journalist for the West German magazine ''

Stern The stern is the back or aft-most part of a ship or boat, technically defined as the area built up over the sternpost, extending upwards from the counter rail to the taffrail. The stern lies opposite the bow, the foremost part of a ship. Ori ...

''.Ilan Berman, J. Michael Waller, ''Dismantling tyranny: transitioning beyond totalitarian regimes'', p. 72, Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, ,

References

External links

Gitta Bauer
– her activity to save Jews' lives during the

Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...

, at

website {{DEFAULTSORT:Bauer, Gitta Journalists from Berlin German anti-communists German Righteous Among the Nations German women journalists German journalists 20th-century German journalists 1990 deaths 1919 births Roman Catholics in the German Resistance 20th-century German women writers 20th-century German writers