42 Facts About Leo Bauer

Leo Bauer later became a specialist advisor to Chancellor Brandt on East-West German relations.

Leopold Bauer was born in Skalat, a small town in Eastern Galicia which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Leo Bauer 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 to join the Young Socialists in 1927.

The period was one of renewed economic austerity and intensifying political polarisation: Leo Bauer quickly became involved in the confrontations that the organised labour movement was facing.

Leo Bauer switched to the Socialist Workers' Party in 1931, and to the Communists in 1932.

Leo Bauer's situation changed swiftly after the Hitler government took power in January 1933 and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship.

Leo Bauer was placed in a recently completed concentration camp.

Leo Bauer helped found and participated in the "Friends' Circle of the German Popular Front", and from 1935 involved himself in refugee support.

Leo Bauer was among those arrested in Paris in September 1939.

Leo Bauer was held in a succession of internment camps between then and the Franco-German armistice of June 1940.

Leo Bauer faced trial and was convicted in October 1943, found guilty of passport falsification, intelligence activities, "damaging [Swiss] neutrality" and "communist activities".

Leo Bauer 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".

Leo Bauer established links to the Swiss Party of Labour, established earlier that year by members of the Communist Party of Switzerland.

Leo Bauer became secretary to the Centrale sanitaire suisse, a medical welfare organisation originally set up seven years earlier to help victims of the Spanish Civil War.

Leo Bauer 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.

Leo Bauer never made any attempt to present himself as a "typical" Communist party official.

Leo Bauer dressed well and presented himself as self-confident and cosmopolitan.

Leo Bauer was happy to discuss with people from a range of different countries, from different parties and from a broad range of social backgrounds.

Elections were held in December 1946 and Leo Bauer became one of the ten Communist Party members in the state parliament.

Leo Bauer was deputy leader of the Communist Party group in the assembly and a vice-president of the parliament.

Leo Bauer refused to start the daily transmissions with "light morning music", insisting instead that "Bach and Mozart are just right for the workers' breakfast time".

Leo Bauer found himself on the receiving end of pointed criticisms from the increasingly powerful Party Central Committee, both with respect to his political views and regarding his lifestyle choices.

Leo Bauer was inclined to dismiss this as the result of "petty intruge" orchestrated by Walter Ulbricht, and refused to appreciate the dangers he faced.

Leo Bauer was certainly not inclined to see evil in The Party, which he still saw as "the only path to a meaningful life".

Leo Bauer needed the party and the party still had a use for him, but fast moving political currents were emerging to undermine him: he was becoming all too dispensable.

On 23 August 1950 Leopold Bauer was arrested because of his former connections with Noel Field.

Leo Bauer was suspected of having provided extensive help to the "class enemy".

Leo Bauer was excluded from The Party on 1 September 1950.

Leo Bauer's former political comrade, Erica Glaser was a co-accused at the same hearing: she was given the same verdict and sentence.

Leo Bauer was still waiting in his death cell some weeks later when Joseph Stalin died.

Leo Bauer was detained initially in a punishment camp at Tayshet.

Leo Bauer was then transferred to Camp 013 near Bratsk.

Brandt was a man of formidable vision and ability with many admirers: he developed a massive respect for Leo Bauer's quick-witted insightfulness, and his deep understanding of the inner workings of the East German Leninist power structure and the workings of the comrades' quasi-socialist society.

Brandt was a deeply compassionate man who bought to their friendship an acute appreciation of the extent to which Leo Bauer had suffered during his life.

Between 1968 and 1972 Leo Bauer was the editor in chief of "Die Neue Gesellschaft", the SPD's rather cerebral monthly political magazine.

Leo Bauer signed a contract with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation as a research associate.

In 1969 Willy Brandt took over from Kurt Georg Kiesinger as Chancellor of Germany and Leo Bauer became a personal advisor to the chancellor, employed in the Federal Chancellery.

Leo Bauer advised, principally, on East-West German relations at a time when the governments on both sides of the internal border were keen to regularise various pieces of unfinished business which had persisted since 1949.

Yet despite his position at the heart of the West German political establishment, Leo Bauer remained an outsider.

Towards the end of his life Leopold Bauer became seriously ill as a result of the torture to which he had been subjected in the 1950s.

Leo Bauer was still not quite 60 when he died in Bonn.