Anxiously waiting for news of Käthe Leichter in Paris

Otto Leichter, in exile in Paris, was desperate for news of his wife’s whereabouts. The last evidence that she was alive was a letter from the German Red Cross in 1940.

Käthe Leichterwas born Marianne Katharina Pick on August 20, 1895, in Vienna. She grew up in a middle-class Jewish family and developed an interest in social issues at an early age. When many working-class men went off to fight in the war in 1914, 19-year-old Käthe set about helping the women left behind to manage on their own. They still had to work, leaving their children at home alone. Käthe organized donations, arranged childcare, and saw firsthand how precarious the lives of the working class were. These experiences would later shape her research and her life’s work.

That same year, she won a place to study political science at the University of Vienna. As a woman, she was unable to obtain a degree in Austria, so she moved to Heidelberg and earned her doctorate there in 1918. She returned to Austria in 1919, joined the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP), and worked as a research assistant in the State Commission for Socialization. The SDAP was still part of the coalition government in power in Austria at the time.

Committed to women’s rights

Around this time, she met Otto Leichter, a law student who, like her, had grown up in a middle-class Jewish family and was a committed Social Democrat. They fell in love, got married in 1921, and had two sons – Heinz (born in 1924) und Franz (born in 1930). Even as a mother, Käthe remained politically involved, campaigning for women’s rights and for economic independence for female workers.

In 1925, she established the Women’s Labor Department at the Austrian Chamber of Labor – a statutory body representing the interests of female blue- and white-collar workers. She turned her back on her Jewish faith and left the religious community, as did her husband Otto, who by then was working as a journalist for workers’ newspapers.

Years of persecution

The Social Democratic Workers’ Party was banned in February 1934 following a workers’ uprising, the Chamber of Labor was placed under government control, and an authoritarian one-party state was established under the Christian Social Party. Käthe and Otto lost their jobs, went underground, and fled into exile in Switzerland, taking their sons with them. In the fall of the same year, they dared to return and began planning resistance activities against the Austrofascist Ständestaat, Austria’s authoritarian one-party state.

In 1938, Austria was annexed by the German Reich (the “Anschluss”). Otto fled immediately, this time to Paris. Käthe stayed behind, wanting to organize her move with the children more carefully. She was arrested by the Gestapo on May 30, 1938. She had to spend three months in solitary confinement at Vienna Regional Court. During this time, Otto managed to bring their sons to Paris. “Before I left, I was allowed to visit my mother and found her in good spirits and full of hope. Nobody could have imagined at the time that this visit would be my mother’s last opportunity to say farewell to her family in person,” recalled her son Heinz later.

Conviction and imprisonment

As early as October 1938, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) tried to find out her whereabouts by contacting the German Red Cross (DRK) in Berlin, which in turn wrote to the responsible office in Vienna, requesting information. Otto may well have been behind these inquiries, which he probably made through acquaintances. He did not ask for information directly himself for fear of putting his wife in greater danger. Instead he wrote his wife daily letters – letters that were never sent, but that served as a diary for Otto.

“Since you’ve been at the Regional Court – if that’s where you are – no news from you and no information at all about your situation,” he wrote in his letter diary on October 7, 1938. In January 1939, the ICRC finally received a reply. Her family learned that she had been charged with high treason – and also that she was allowed to receive mail, parcels, and visitors. From that point on, her sons and the woman who was caring for them began sending her letters. Otto used these letters to send his wife coded messages.

In October 1939, she was sentenced to seven months in a penitentiary. After that, her whereabouts were once again unknown. Because she had spent a long period in pre-trial detention, she had, in effect, already served her sentence. But she was not released. The ICRC submitted another request for information about her whereabouts. It was not until January 1940 that her family learned that Käthe had been taken into what was called “protective custody” – a form of arbitrary detention without trial – immediately after sentencing and had been transferred to the Gestapo police prison. Her deportation to Ravensbrück concentration camp followed in December 1939.

“Breaking heavy stones, unloading building materials late into the night, usually without food, and then standing for hours as a punishment before going to bed for two or three hours.” This is what Käthe’s life looked like from then on, as Rosa Jochmann would later explain. However, like Olga Benario Prestes, she tried to make life more bearable for her fellow inmates. They made small games, secretly passed on poems or a piece of bread to other women. On Sundays, Käthe would organize literary afternoons or rehearse plays with some of them. “The opportunity to speak a few words with Käthe gave many of us strength,” Rosa later recalled.

In January 1942, a delegation of doctors arrived at the camp and selected a number of women – most of them Jews – for a “new camp.” They were supposed to be picked up in the depths of winter, but the trucks could not get through because of the bad weather. Käthe responded with dry humor. “It’s almost embarrassing; I feel like someone who keeps saying they’re going away on a journey, but then turns up again after all,” her friend Rosa later recounted. But eventually, the time came. “To this day, I can still see Käthe sitting in the back of the truck in the bitter cold, her blue eyes fixed on us: Waving, she disappeared forever”, Rosa remembered .

Murdered at Bernburg

Like Olga Benario Prestes and Hedwig Feinkuchen, Käthe Leichter was murdered in the Bernburg killing center together with over 1,000 other women. The SS recorded her date of death as March 17. “On May 1, 1942 (on May 1 of all days!) we received the news of my mother’s death. According to the official notice from the Nazi authorities she was said to have died of a ‘circulatory disorder,’” wrote her son Heinz in the afterword to the later publication of his father’s letter diary.

He, his brother Franz, and their father Otto survived the Nazi era in the USA, and all three stayed there for the rest of their lives. For decades, Otto Leichter’s letter diaries were thought to be lost. Not until the fall of the Iron Curtain in the 1990s were they were discovered in a Moscow archive and published.

Further readings and information (in German)