1. Margarete Buber-Neumann wrote the famous memoir Under Two Dictators, which begins with her arrest in Moscow during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, followed by her imprisonment as a political prisoner in both the Soviet Gulag and the Nazi concentration camp system, after she was handed over by the NKVD to the Gestapo during World War II.
Margarete Buber-Neumann Thuring was born on 21 October 1901, in Potsdam, German Empire.
Margarete Buber-Neumann's father, Heinrich Thuring, was a master brewer; her mother was Else Merten.
Margarete Buber-Neumann had four siblings: Lisette, Gertrud, and two brothers, Heinrich and Hans.
Margarete Buber-Neumann disliked the militarism of German culture in her youth and the way that her father was awe-struck by officers of Potsdam's large Imperial German Army garrison.
In 1919, Margarete Buber-Neumann enrolled at Pestalozzi-Frobel Haus in Berlin to learn to teach kindergarten.
Margarete Buber-Neumann sought to become a member of groups of kindred spirits to fight injustice.
In 1921 or 1922, Margarete Buber-Neumann Thuring married Rafael Buber, the communist son of the philosopher Martin Buber with whom she had two daughters: Barbara and Judith.
Margarete Buber-Neumann lived on Babelsberger Strasse, where she took in communists like the Dimitroff couple, who were evading police.
Margarete Buber-Neumann criticized Stalin's German policy in the 1930s, which led to his arrest and execution in the Great Purge.
Margarete Buber-Neumann married Helmuth Faust after she went to live in Frankfurt-am-Main; they divorced.
Margarete Buber-Neumann's daughters lived with her and then with their paternal grandparents.
Margarete Buber-Neumann obtained a job as an editor for Inprecor, the International Press Correspondence.
Margarete Buber-Neumann never learned in her lifetime that her husband was executed on 26 November 1937.
Margarete Buber-Neumann was held at the Lubianka Prison, then at Butyrka Prison, and was sent to labour camps in Karaganda and then in Burma, both in Kazakhstan.
Margarete Buber-Neumann was sent to Germany, along with some other Soviet political prisoners, including Betty Olberg, a wife of a German communist who was executed in 1936.
Margarete Buber-Neumann was then detained with other "political prisoners" in Ravensbruck concentration camp, where she became friends with Orli Wald and Milena Jesenska.
Margarete Buber-Neumann was unpopular with most of the women, as communist inmates, who were influential in the camp, disapproved of her testifying to the hardships that she had endured in the Soviet Union.
Margarete Buber-Neumann's existence improved when she had the companionship of Jesenska.
Margarete Buber-Neumann worked in a clerical capacity in the Siemens plant attached to the camp and later as secretary to a camp official, SS-Oberaufseherin Johanna Langefeld.
Margarete Buber-Neumann remained in the camp until the end of World War II.
On 23 February 1949, Margarete Buber-Neumann testified in Paris in support of Victor Kravchenko, a Soviet defector who was suing Les Lettres Francaises, a French magazine connected with the Communist Party of France, for libel after it had accused him of fabricating his account of Soviet labour camps.
Margarete Buber-Neumann corroborated Kravchenko's account in great detail and so contributed to his victory in the case.
In 1950, Margarete Buber-Neumann returned to Germany and settled in Frankfurt-am-Main as a staunch anti-communist.
Margarete Buber-Neumann continued to write for the next three decades.
Margarete Buber-Neumann became a political conservative and joined the Christian Democratic Union in 1975.
In 1980, Margarete Buber-Neumann received the Great Cross of Merit of the West Germany.
Margarete Buber-Neumann died at age 88 on November 6,1989, in Frankfurt am Main, three days before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Margarete Buber-Neumann had the sad privilege to span the 20th century as the only person to have testified publicly in writing about the experience of both Soviet and Nazi camps.
Margarete Buber-Neumann would survive to tell, tirelessly, without bitterness and without illusions, what power does to those who hold it and to those whom it holds.