Departures of note

Maria Reese, born Maria Meyer, was a German teacher and journalist who became a Communist Reichstag deputy after defecting from the Social Democrats in 1929. In 1933, after fleeing Nazi Germany to Moscow, she grew disillusioned with Stalinist functionaries and the Soviet failure to respond to Hitler's rise. She escaped to Paris, publicly resigned from the Communist Party in an open letter endorsed by Leon Trotsky, and then returned to Germany, where she worked for the Nazi Propaganda Ministry and co-authored the bestselling anti-Soviet book 'Abrechnung mit Moskau' (1938).

Reese was born in Michelbach, in the Prussian Rhine province, to a schoolteacher father. She trained as a teacher in Bonn and took a post at Lüxem, where she clashed with a schools inspector over her gender. During World War I, she was dismissed from her post and sentenced to five months in prison for employing French prisoners of war. After the war, she joined the SPD and worked as an editor in Trier. In 1928, she was elected to the Reichstag for the SPD, but a year later she switched to the Communist Party, believing it more genuinely socialist. She worked closely with Clara Zetkin and edited the magazine 'Die rote Einheitsfront'.

After the Nazi takeover in 1933, Reese emigrated via Denmark to Sweden, was deported to the Soviet Union, and settled in Moscow. There she reconnected with Zetkin, who shared her disappointment with the German Communist exiles and called Stalin a 'devil'. Reese was openly critical of Soviet inaction and was nearly banned from Moscow. With Zetkin's help, she left for Paris, where she condemned the Comintern and Willi Münzenberg's counter-trial to the Reichstag Fire trial. Her resignation letter, published in November 1933 with a preface by Trotsky, was dismissed by the French Communist newspaper 'L'Humanité' as 'irresponsible chit-chat'. She was shunned by Communists and harassed by authorities, leading her to return to Germany.

Back in Germany, Reese was summoned to Berlin and invited to speak on Nazi propaganda radio, including broadcasts aimed at France. She later said she spoke 'for Germany', not for National Socialism. She received a commission from Joseph Goebbels to write a book with Ernst Torgler, her former Communist colleague, and was paid by the Gestapo, which nonetheless classified her as an 'unreliable trusted person'. After 1938, she retreated into obscurity. In June 1944, her son was shot for suspected desertion, but the military high court later admitted the error. After the war, she was interned by the French military government from 1946 to 1948 for her work with Goebbels. She returned to teaching, re-embraced Roman Catholicism, and died suddenly in 1958, two days after moving to Zell on the Moselle.