23 Facts About Edith Baumann

Edith Baumann was a co-founder and official of the Free German Youth, the youth organisation that after 1946 became the youth wing of East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party.

Edith Baumann was born into a working-class family in Prenzlauer Berg, at that time a recently developed district on the southern edge of Berlin.

Edith Baumann joined the Socialist Workers' Youth movement in 1925, remaining a member till 1931.

Edith Baumann joined the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany in 1931, which was the year in which it broke away from the more moderate mainstream Social Democratic Party.

Edith Baumann was a leading member of the Socialist Youth League of Germany, the youth wing of the SAPD.

Edith Baumann was a political activist in the "wrong" party.

Edith Baumann was brutally beaten and arrested by the Gestapo in August 1933.

Edith Baumann faced trial in December 1934 and was sentenced by the special "people's court" to three years in prison for preparing to commit high treason.

In September 1945 Edith Baumann was recruited to work with Erich Honecker to establish the Free German Youth organisation.

Edith Baumann started out as the FDJ General Secretary and then became its deputy chairman, a position she retained until 1949.

Edith Baumann was a top level party functionary from the outset.

Between 1949 and 1953 Edith Baumann belonged to the secretariat of the Central Committee, serving, between 1953 and 1955, as party secretary of the regional party leadership team for Berlin itself.

From its inception in 1947 Edith Baumann herself sat as a member of the German People's Council and of the East German National Parliament which replaced it in 1949.

Edith Baumann retained her parliamentary seat till her death in 1973.

In 1947 Edith Baumann was a co-founder of the Democratic Women's League which, like the FDJ, was one of the so-called mass organisations with the accompanying "National Front" political privileges such as direct representation in the national parliament "Volkskammer".

Edith Baumann remained a member of the DFD national executive till 1964.

Edith Baumann was elected to serve on the Women's International Democratic Federation Executive Council in 1953.

When he took over, his marriage to Edith Baumann was already a subject of discussion in the West German press.

Understandably a lot of normally mainstream and uncontentious information on the Honecker-Edith Baumann marriage emerged only after 1989, and even now sources differ over quite basic aspects of it.

Edith Baumann was still married to Charlotte in the summer of 1947 when he and Edith travelled together to Moscow.

Edith Baumann had written persuasively that Ulbricht should cut off her husband's lover from her important youth work and send her away from Berlin.

Honecker was at this point still sharing an apartment with his wife Edith Baumann and their daughter Erika, born in 1950.

Edith Baumann was not embarrassed however, over how she used her relationships to later reach the pinnacle of power in East Germany.