22 Facts About Friedel Apelt

Friedel Apelt was a German political activist, trades union official and politician.

Friedel Apelt retained her final name, Friedel Apelt, for nearly fifty years, between 1952 and 2001.

Friedel Apelt attended middle school locally and then worked as a weaver and homeworker, initially still in Breslau between 1917 and 1923, and again between 1927 and 1930.

In 1925 Friedel Apelt Franz joined the Textile Workers' Trades Union, remaining a member till her exclusion from it in 1929.

Friedel Apelt was a works council member between 1927 and 1930.

Between 1926 and 1933 Friedel Apelt Franz sat as a member of the Provincial parliament for Lower Silesia.

Friedel Apelt was the youngest of the party's 31 Prussian Landtag members.

Friedel Apelt was not re-elected in the election of March 1933.

Work for the communist part became illegal: Friedel Apelt Franz pursued her illegal political work.

Friedel Apelt served her three-year prison sentence in Jauer before being transferred to the concentration camps at Moringen and then Lichtenburg where she spent a further two years in "protective custody".

Friedel Apelt Franz was among them, in the context of what came to be known as Aktion Gitter: she was transferred to Ravensbruck concentration camp.

In 1999, more than fifty years later, at the age of 97, having become through marriage Fridel Friedel Apelt, she was still involved in a meeting held at the nearby Wentowsee Hotel, at which concentration camp survivors met Daimler-Benz executives in order to discuss wages and fair recompense in respect of their time as forced labourers at the Genshagen plant.

On 4 May 1945, while undertaking one of the so-called death marches of camp inmates towards the west, Friedel Apelt Franz managed to escape captivity in the Prignitz region.

Friedel Apelt reported to the town hall in order to arrange ration coupons for food.

Friedel Apelt was already, by the end of 1945, a department head for Women's Questions with the Communist Party Central Committee.

Friedel Apelt was a member of the FDGB national executive between 1946 and 1989.

Friedel Apelt was a founder, in 1947, of the Democratic Women's League, serving on its national executive between 1948 and 1955.

Friedel Apelt served in the Ministry for Labour and Professional Training as a secretary of state and deputy minister between 1950 and 1956.

Friedel Apelt retired from all her full-time posts in 1956 on health grounds, although she continued to hold a number of less onerous, honorary and part-time positions.

Between 1959 and 1990 Friedel Apelt chaired the East German Human Rights Committee, an FDGB initiative that initially focused on West German citizens disadvantaged by the 1956 constitutional court ban on the Communist Party, although Apelt's committee later extended its remit to include persecuted left wing leaders from more distant countries, such as the Chilean Luis Corvalan and the South African Nelson Mandela.

Friedel Apelt was a member of the Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime between 1947 and 1953, and then of its successor organisation, the League of Antifascists.

Friedel Apelt died in Friedrichshagen during the first half of December 2001, although sources differ over her precise date of death.