Gisela von Pöllnitz

Von Pöllnitz was an diplomat's daughter and fervid communist.[2] She was also considered an adventurer and rebel.[3] She visited Scotland for the raspberry harvest, Greece and the Balkans and always travelled alone.[3]

Von Pöllnitz had been a member of the Young Communist League of Germany (KJVD) in Hamburg before 1933. As the result of her background and extensive travel experience, she wasn't taken seriously by her peers in the communist group.[3] In the same year she was interrogated for being a communist and she badly beaten.[3] When she hit back, she was imprisoned for two months in Fuhlsbüttel prison in November 1933.[4] In 1934 Von Pöllnitz was again under scrutiny, when she was searched by a Gestapo official. The banned Rote Hilfe organisation booklet was found stuffed down her underpants but she managed to grab it, tear it up and swallow the small pieces of paper.[3] However she spent another two months in prison and was denied a driving licence as additional punishment.[3] The Gestapo realised that she was not a fervent or dogmatic leftist, merely there her excursions for the KJVD and later for the Communist Party of Germany were a reflection of her thirst for adventure.[3]

In the mid-1930s with the help from her distant cousin Libertas Schulze-Boysen, she found a job as a short-hand typist position at a news bureaux for the news agency United Press, that later led to a posting as journalist under the direction of Gösta von Uexküll.[5]

In 1937, Von Pöllnitz, by now an activist and anti-fascist, as well as the writer and pacifist Günther Weisenborn, joined the private meetings usually held in the apartment of the sculptor Kurt Schumacher, which at the time still a discussion group.[6] However both Von Pöllnitz as the rebel and adventurer and Weisenborn the anti-fascist weren't prepared to sit in private meetings and moan about the tyranny of Hitler.[7] They both called for action.[6]

Also in 1937, Von Pöllnitz received information from Schulze-Boysen about the Spanish Civil War that enabled her to prepare leaflets about the war, that she then passed to Elfriede Paul, who hand posted them to letter boxes throughout Berlin.[8]

In February 1938, Schulze-Boysen had compiled a short information document about a sabotage enterprise planned in Barcelona by the German Wehrmacht. It was an action from "Special Staff W", an organisation established by Luftwaffe general Helmuth Wilberg to study and analyse the tactical lessons learned by the Legion Kondor during the Spanish Civil War.[6] The unit also directed the German relief operations that consisted of volunteers, weapons and ammunition for General Francisco Franco FET y de las JONS Party.[6] The information that Schulze-Boysen collected included details about German transports, deployment of units and companies involved in the German defence.[6] The group around Schulze-Boysen didn't know how to deliver the information. They discovered that Von Pöllnitz was planning to visit the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne that was being held in Paris between 25 May to 25 November 1937.[9] After extensive discussion the group decided that she should deliver the letter to the Soviet Embassy in Paris.[9] In due course, Von Pöllnitz fulfilled her mission and placed the letter in the mailbox of the Soviet Embassy on the Bois de Boulogne.[3] Unfortunately Von Pöllnitz was being watched by the Gestapo and after posting the letter she was arrested in November 1937 by the Gestapo.[6]

In this context, the historian Heinrich Scheel recalled the words of a Gestapo commissioner:

During the Spanish Civil War, we sent people of ours to the International Brigade as spies. Schulze-Boysen knew their names and transmitted them to the Reds. Our people were then put on the wall.

The resistance group fearing discovery and arrest, temporarily disbanded.[10] The apartment of the Schulze-Boysen's were searched and although the Gestapo had demanded the dismissal of Harro Schulze-Boysen, he only received an official reprimand at the Ministry of Aviation.[11]

On 5th July 1938 von Pöllnitz was released from Gestapo imprisonment after five months.[3] Once she was released, the group found she was emaciated, her skin white as paper but found she has kept silent and not revealed the reason for her trip to Paris.[3] However she had weak lungs and in prison she was infected with tuberculosis.[3]

On 15 June 1939, Pöllnitz now seriously ill with pulmonary tuberculosis and on the advice of her doctor Elfriede Paul was taken to a sanatorium in Switzerland, where she died a few weeks later.[12]

• Paul, Elfriede; Küchenmeister, Wera (1987). Ein Sprechzimmer der Roten Kapelle (3rd ed.). Berlin: Militärverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. ISBN 9783327004210.
• Coppi, Hans (1995). Harro Schulze-Boysen - Wege in den Widerstand eine biographische Studie, Technical University of Berlin (Thesis). Koblenz Fölbach. ISBN 9783923532285. OCLC 1068161156.
• Scheel, Heinrich (1993). Vor den Schranken des Reichskriegsgerichts : mein Weg in den Widerstand [In front of the barriers of the Reichskriegsgericht: My way into the resistance] (in German). Berlin: Ed. q. ISBN 9783861241478. OCLC 246617412.
• Kettelhake, Silke (2008). Erzähl allen, allen von mir Das schöne kurze Leben der Libertas Schulze-Boysen 1913-1942 [Tell everyone, all of me;The beautiful short life of the Libertas Schulze-Boysen 1913-1942]. Munich: Droemer. ISBN 342627437X. OCLC 770669492.
• Rosiejka, Gert (1986). Die Rote Kapelle : "Landesverrat" als antifaschist. Widerstand [The Red Chapel: "Treason" as an anti-fascist. Resistance]. Ergebnisse (in German). 33. Hamburg: Ergebnisse. ISBN 9783925622168. OCLC 74741321.

• Walter Küchenmeister