Margarete Buber-Neumann

Margarete Buber-Neumann (21 October 1901 – 6 November 1989), was a member of the Communist Party of Germany during the years of the Weimar Republic. She survived imprisonment in concentration camps during World War II in both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. After the war, she wrote a memoir of her time in both of these camps and served as a star witness during the so-called "trial of the century" in the Kravchenko Affair in France.

Margarete Buber-Neumann was born Margarete Thüring in Potsdam, and in her youth was active in socialist youth organisations. After World War I she became more radical and joined the newly founded Communist Party of Germany (KPD). In 1922 she married Rafael Buber, communist son of the philosopher Martin Buber, who was Jewish. They had two daughters. Following her divorce in 1929 she lived in unmarried union with Heinz Neumann, a leading German Communist. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Neumanns went into exile in the Soviet Union. During the 1930s they both worked for the Comintern, first in France and then in Spain.

In 1920, Buber-Neumann's sister, Babette Thüring, had married Fritz Gross of Vienna, who moved to Germany after World War I and became a member of the KPD. They had a son in 1923, then separated. Babette retained her married name of 'Babette Gross' for the rest of her life. (Fritz Gross moved to England in the 1930s, helped refugees during World War II, and died in 1946 with a considerable corpus of mostly unpublished work.) Babette then became communist (commonlaw) wife of Willi Münzenberg, under whom Otto Katz and Arthur Koestler worked in Paris. In Münzenberg's office, Koestler met both sisters. Koestler would remain a friend after both he and Buber-Neumann had left the party. (As "Babette Gross," Buber-Neuman's sister later wrote a biography of Münzenberg.)

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