Leopold Bauer (born Eliezer Lippa Ben Jossip David ha Cohen: 18 December 1912 – 18 September 1972) was a German political activist and journalist, originally from Galicia. For reasons of race and politics he spent the twelve Nazi years in exile. That eventful period included more than one year locked up by the authorities in Switzerland where grounds for his conviction included "damaging [Swiss] neutrality" ("Verletzung der Neutralität"). After 1945 he remained politically engaged. In 1953 he was deported by a military court in East Berlin to the Soviet Union for execution. In the event his sentence was commuted to a 25-year stretch in a Siberian labor camp. Then in October 1955, he was released to West Germany in the context of a general agreement between the governments in Bonn and Moscow for the return of surviving German prisoners of war. Leo Bauer later became a specialist advisor to Chancellor Brandt on East-West German relations ("Ostpolitik").
Life Provenance and early years Leopold Bauer was born in Skalat, a small town in Eastern Galicia which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. (Today it is in western Ukraine.) His father was a watchmaker and a gold trader. During the second half of the nineteenth century the population of Skalat had been boosted by the arrival of large numbers of Jews seeking to escape the pogroms taking place in the western territories of Russia. There are estimates that by 1900 approximately 50% of the town's population were Jewish. In July 1914 war broke out. According to one source it was in order to get away from more pogroms that the family fled to the west. Elsewhere it is stated simply that they wished to get away from the advancing Russians. They ended up in Chemnitz, in southern central Germany which is where Leo Bauer attended school between 1919 and 1930. He was granted German citizenship in 1924 or 1925.
At school, while still only fourteen, Bauer was influenced by a teacher who was a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to join the Young Socialists ("Sozialistische Arbeiter-Jugend") in 1927. The next year he joined the party itself. The period was one of renewed economic austerity and intensifying political polarisation: Bauer quickly became involved in the confrontations that the organised labour movement was facing. In 1930 the family moved to Berlin. Instead of moving to a new school, during 1931/32 he was privately tutored. In 1932 he passed the school final exam (Abitur), which opened the way to university-level education. Politically he tended towards the left wing of the Social Democratic Party. He switched to the Socialist Workers' Party ("Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands" / SAP) in 1931, and to the Communists in 1932.
University and régime change In 1932 he enrolled at Berlin University and embarked on a degree course covering Jurisprudence and Applied Economics ("Nationalökonomie "). His situation changed swiftly after the Hitler government took power in January 1933 and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. The antisemitism that in 1932 had merely been a toxic rhetorical device for populist politicians was now transformed into a core pillar of government strategy. Leopold Bauer was excluded from his university studies because of his Jewish provenance and/or of his illegal political activism.
During 1932/33 Bauer was employed by the party's "M-Apparat", which operated in Germany till 1937 as the Communist Party's (rather misleadingly named) intelligence branch. Within the organisation he was known by the code name "Rudi". The Communist Party had been targeted with increased intensity by the authorities since the end of February 1933 and Bauer, by now aged 21, was one of many party comrades arrested and detained during March 1933. He was placed in a recently completed concentration camp. It was only with the help of a former school friend who had now joined the "SA" (a Nazi paramilitary organisation) that his release was secured in June 1933. (The friend was himself shot a year later in the context of the so-called Röhm purge.) Bauer resumed his illegal activity for the "M-Apparat".
National Socialist years and exile In December 1933, using the cover name "Rudolf Katz", he emigrated to Prague from where, with other comrades, he was ordered by the party leadership to move on in February 1934 to Paris. Over the next few years, he worked against the National Socialist régime in Germany. He helped found and participated in the "Friends' Circle of the German Popular Front", and from 1935 involved himself in refugee support. Between 1936 and 1939, still based in Paris, he served as Assistant Secretary to the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from Germany. Both Paris and Prague were centres of political activity for exiled German Communists during the middle and (in the case of Paris) later 1930s. After the Munich Agreement Leo Bauer was sent back to Prague where, again using the pseudonym "Rudolf Katz" he played a central role in organsising the evacuation of German Communist Party cadres to England.
War broke out in September 1939 and for most Parisians there were few immediate changes. That was not the experience of several thousand German political refugees who had sought refuge from persecution by moving to Paris, however. Leo Bauer was among those arrested in Paris in September 1939. He was held in a succession of internment camps between then and the Franco-German armistice of June 1940. In July 1940 he managed to escape to Switzerland with his party comrade Paul Bertz. In Switzerland he lived illegally under the identity of a bank employee in Geneva and the name "Paul-Eric Perret". He became a Communist Party informant/contact ("Vertrauensmann") in West Switzerland and took part in "frontier work" involving the Franco-Swiss border.
Leo Bauer met Noel Field in October 1941. There is no consensus between sources over whether Field should be regarded principally an American spy working to undermine the Soviet Union or a Soviet spy working, during the war years, in France and Switzerland to support Jewish communist and anti-fascist refugees. There were more Geneva meetings between Bauer and Field between October 1941 and October 1942, with Bauer serving as a link man between Noel Field and the exiled Communist Party leader Paul Bertz, who was hiding in Bern (central Switzerland). The meetings evidently came to the attention of the Swiss authorities, and on 27 October 1942 the bank clerk and espionage suspect Paul-Eric Perret (as Leo Bauer was still known in this context) was arrested at his Geneva home. At the same time significant quantities of incriminating material relating to his party work were found. For Bauer a year of investigatory detention followed. He faced trial and was convicted in October 1943, found guilty of passport falsification, intelligence activities, "damaging [Swiss] neutrality" and "communist activities". The sentence was a thirty-month jail term of which twelve months had already been served during investigatory detention. He appears to have spent his time in investigatory detention and several subsequent months in the Saint-Antoine prison, after which he was moved to the Bassecourt internment camp, recently created for "political detainees".
In May 1944 he secured early release from the internment camp at Bassecourt, albeit subject to post-release conditions and monitoring (Aufbewahrungspflicht. In June 1944 he began to work for the National Committee for a Free Germany, an organisation having its origins in the prisoner of war camps of the Soviet Union which, during the final part of the war, was extending its remit outside the Soviet Union. Bauer became its regional leader for western Switzerland. He established links to the Swiss Party of Labour (Partei der Arbeit der Schweiz / PdA), established earlier that year by members of the (since 1940 illegal) Communist Party of Switzerland. He also became secretary to the Centrale sanitaire suisse (CSS), a medical welfare organisation originally set up seven years earlier to help ("internationalist" anti-Franco) victims of the Spanish Civil War. Among conservative elements in Switzerland it is still viewed as seriously "left-wing", and in 1944 the CSS was believed to be closely aligned with the Communist Party.
Postwar Germany (US occupation zone) Leo Bauer returned to Germany in July 1945. He returned not to his former home city of Chemnitz, which was now part of the Soviet occupation zone, but to Frankfurt am Main which was becoming the principal military and administrative center for the American occupation zone. Here he established himself as the Frankfurt representative of the CSS. There are also references for his having also been operating as a secret informant ("geheimer Mitarbeiter") for one of the Soviet intelligence services during his time in Frankfurt. He would later recall that during this period he heard himself described by a senior party comrade as "the kind of highly ambitious young party official who evidently wanted to go all the way to the top". Frankfurt was the principal city in the newly configured State of Hesse. With the western two-thirds of Germany carved into four separate military occupation zones, Bauer fought enthusiastically for a unified "antifascist Democratic Germany". From Bauer's communist perspective that ambition failed because (except in the Soviet occupation zone) negotiations to merge the (neo-communist) Socialist Unity Party with the Social Democratic Party failed. During the later 1940s Leo Bauer emerged as a leading figure in the regional Communist Party leadership team, and as one of the most prominent politicians in Hesse, though he also found it all too easy to generate mistrust, even among party comrades. Leo Bauer never made any attempt to present himself as a "typical" Communist party official. He dressed well and presented himself as self-confident and cosmopolitan. He was happy to discuss with people from a range of different countries, from different parties and from a broad range of social backgrounds. One commentator suggests that this was because most of his exile from Nazi Germany was spent in Paris and Geneva, both intellectually dynamic and diverse cities. But the thirty men who had flown into Berlin on 30 April 1930 with a carefully honed nation-building programme for Germany had lived for twelve years in Moscow during the most oppressive years of Stalin's dictatorship. The public face of Germany's political leadership team in the Soviet occupation zone was Walter Ulbricht.
During 1945/46 Bauer became a freelance contributor to the Frankfurter Rundschau, a mass-market daily newspaper which in August 1945 was the first daily newspaper to be granted a licence by the military administration. During 1946/47 he was also the producer of a party newspaper called "Wissen und Tat" (loosely, "Knowledge and Action"). In February 1946 he was appointed one of the two Communist Party members of the twelve-person Beratender Landesausschuss (loosely, "Advisory State Committee") for the state of Hesse. This was a precursor body to a regional parliament: members were not elected but nominated by their parties and selected according to a complicated (and contentious) process that broadly reflected the balance of support for the parties (leaving out the National Socialists) that had been apparent in 1932, which was the last time free elections had been held in Germany. Elections were held in December 1946 and Leo Bauer became one of the ten Communist Party members in the state parliament ("Landtag"). He was deputy leader of the Communist Party group in the assembly and a vice-president of the parliament. In reality, his participation in the state parliament came to an end in 1948, however; although he was formally a member till 30 June 1949.
Postwar Germany (Soviet occupation zone)