Ilse Frieda Gertrud Stöbe (17 May 1911 – 22 December 1942) was a German left-wing journalist, Soviet GRU agent and anti-Nazi resistance fighter. As a young woman, Stöbe was exposed to communist ideology through her parents. After her parents split up, she had to leave the Rathaus grammar school she was attending and trained as a typist.
In 1929, wanting to become a journalist, she was employed as a secretary at the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper. There she made deep impression on the editor Theodor Wolff, who wrote a novel about her, "Die Schwimmerin". While there she met the journalist Rudolf Herrnstadt who shared the same communist ideology. In 1931, Herrnstadt recruited Stöbe into the Soviet GRU as a spy. As her career progressed at the newspaper during the early 1930s she visited several countries in Europe to write articles, all the while conducting spying operations for the GRU. Forced to leave Germany in 1933 after losing her job due to the worsening political situation and the rise of Nazism, she first moved to Czechoslovakia. However her face became known after being seen with a Gestapo officer. The GRU then moved her to Warsaw in late 1935. There she worked as the foreign correspondent for the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper and through them, met a group of left-leaning, liberal anti-nazis who worked at the German embassy. Amongst them was legation councillor Rudolf von Scheliha who supplied intelligence to Stöbe.
In 1939, when the German embassy closed in Warsaw due to the impending German invasion, she moved back to Berlin. There she commanded a Soviet espionage network, while working in the Foreign Office, receiving material from von Scheliha that was delivered to Soviet embassy. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, she lost contact with Soviet intelligence. Several attempts were made by the GRU to contact her but these failed. Her network was discovered after a Soviet blunder led them to expose her details in a radio message. She was arrested and executed in 1942.
Life Ilse Stöbe grew up in a working-class home in Berlin. She was the only daughter of carpenter Max Stöbe and his wife Frieda née Schumann. Stöbe had an eight-year-older half-brother from her mother's first marriage, Kurt Müller. The family spent their first year at Mainzer Straße 1 in Lichtenberg, Berlin, before the couple moved to Jungstrasse 14 in Berlin. Both her parents were communist sympathisers but didn't join the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Her half-brother was radicalised in the area they lived in, which was blighted by poverty and unemployment. It led him to become an active KPD member, taking part in bloody battles between the KPD and the SPD.
There is little information about their youth. However, it is likely she attended the local secondary school located about 3 minutes from her house, before receiving a recommendation to move to grammar school, attending in Lichtenberg. At Rathaus, she met her lifelong friend, later publisher and author . In 1927, her parents had separated and as a single parent her mother couldn't afford the fees, forcing her to leave in 1927. Her father was no longer mentioned in her letters to her mother, whom she was close to. Stöbe then attended a trade school (Volks- und Handelsschule) to learn a profession as a shorthand typist.
Career In April 1929, Stöbe began working in the marketing department of the publishing house of the democrat and liberal Rudolf Mosse and then worked as secretary to the journalist, writer Theodor Wolff who was editor-in-chief of the Mosse owned Berliner Tageblatt. Wolff strongly admired Stöbe and promoted her to an editor with her own office close to his. He would eventually write a novel "Die Schwimmerin. Ein Roman aus der Gegenwart" (The Swimmer. A novel from the present) that explores the relationship between bank director Ulrich Faber and his secretary Gerda Rohr. The literary figure of Rohr is based on Stöbe. The novel can best be described as a mood inspired by admiration rather than a description of any concrete events. Wolff's homage to Stöbe and his own reputation guarantees Stöbe's anti-Nazi, proletarian and humanist stance.
At the "Berliner Tageblatt" she met the Jewish editor and communist Rudolf Herrnstadt, eight years her senior and became good friends with him. The couple eventually became engaged. Herrnstadt believed that the political ideology of capitalism with its inherent structural problems in the 1920s, brought on by military defeat, reparations and debt would be replaced by socialism, or indeed communism. From the beginning, Stöbe shared the same political ideology as Herrnstadt. There was an expectation that both of them would join the KPD and several sources state that Stöbe joined the KPD in 1929. However, a study by the German historian Elke Scherstjanoi found that they were told by a KPD official in the Karl Liebknecht house, that they were more useful to the communist party, working outside the KPD. In 1930, when Herrnstadt was a correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt in Prague, he repeatedly tried to join the communist party. His persistence brought him to the notice of Soviet military intelligence, who recruited him as a Red Army GRU agent and gave him the codename "Arbin".
Resistance When Herrnstadt returned to Berlin in 1931, he introduced Stöbe to "Dr. Bosch", who in reality was the Soviet rezident in Berlin, the Latvian Jewish communist and historian (1904–1984). Bronin recruited Stöbe as an agent for the GRU and gradually introduced her to intelligence work. Her codename was "Arnim". From 1931, she worked with Herrnstadt and collected reports that consisted of discussions with Wolff and editorial reports, that were delivered weekly. Being part of an espionage organisation meant clerking duties for Stöbe, e.g. photographing documents, but also involved working in operational tasks like maintaining contact with agents and communist groups in Berlin.
Journalism In early 1933, Stöbe lost her job when Wolff, who was told his name was on the SA death list, fled Germany. Her search for work became a major problem for Stöbe after 1933, as the German economy suffered from the effects of the Great Depression. Stöbe with encouragement from Wolff, decided to become a freelance journalist. In early 1933, Stöbe visited Poprad in the High Tatras in northern Slovakia to interview the Protestant Carpathian German community living there. Stöbe was particularly interested in how German minorities were affected by national policy in Poland and Czechoslovakia. While there, she fell seriously ill with abdominal pain and she was treated by a nephrologist, in an illness, which was the result of rape and that was to affect her for the rest of her life.
During this period she would only return to Germany infrequently. In March 1933, her brother was severely beaten by the SA. On the 14 June 1933, she published her first article "Germanness abroad" on the Zipser Germans in the Berliner Tageblatt. In the same month, Bronin left Germany and he was replaced by . Over the next two years, Stöbe undertook missions for Stiga that involved extensive travel to Austria, France, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Romania. In October 1933, she returned home to Berlin and lived with her mother, due to her illness.
On the 24 February 1934, her article on the peoples of the High Tatras was published in the Swiss newspaper, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), appearing in the Sunday edition. The NZZ continued to publish her work, e.g. an article on FIS Nordic World Ski Championships in Vysoké Tatry was published between the 22 and 25 February 1935. In April 1934, Stöbe was again ill and was admitted to a Berlin hospital. However, the treatment was unsuccessful and in June 1934 she travelled to a sanatorium in the spa town of Franzensbad for further treatment. Several sources indicate that by mid-1934 that Stöbe was then a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party), principally done to disguise her espionage activities. However a search of the archives of Berlin Document Center found no evidence of this.
At the end of 1934, Stöbe moved to Breslau where she temporarily worked as a journalist for the newspaper. In January 1934, the Nazi law (Editor's Law) came into effect, that delivered Nazi control of the German press. The organisation kept registries of “racially pure” Aryan editors and journalists and excluded Jews.
Stöbe had to be registered member, known as an "editor" of the ( (Reich Press Chamber), a Nazi led department of the Reich Chamber of Culture. However, Stöbe failed in her application to the association on 7 June 1935, as she was considered insufficiently experienced to be a journalist.
Bohemia During this period, Stöbe worked as a courier for Stigga and made a number of trips to Bohemia, Czechoslovakia. However, in September 1934, her face became known as she was seen with a Gestapo officer. It resulted in a story being published in the Lidové Listy newspaper, that voiced the suspicion that she was a Gestapo agent. Stöbe was arrested and accused of collaboration by the Czech police. However, she convinced the police she wasn't a collaborator and a retraction had to be printed in the Lidové Listy. The GRU withdrew Stöbe from Prague and sent her to work in Vienna. Although it is not possible to determine how many trips Stöbe made to Bohemia, it is known that some of these trips were for spa treatment for her illness.
Warsaw In November 1935, Stöbe moved to Warsaw and although they were a couple they lived apart in different parts of the city to reduce unwanted attention. As Herrnstadt was Jewish, it meant that marriage was impossible. There she worked as a foreign correspondent for the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, likely arranged through Wolff. Her first article in three parts for the newspaper was "Die deutsche Minderheit" (The German minority"), "Die Ukrainische Minderheit" ('The Ukrainian minority') and the third part was "Die Juden" ('The Jews'). The three-part article examined German, Ukrainian and Jewish minorities in Poland from a political, social, ethnic and religious aspect.
Alta For the new mission she was assigned the new codename "Alta", and helped Herrnstadt establish the new residency in Warsaw, undertook the mundane tasks of intelligence work and worked to establish contact with potential recruits. From 1931 to 1939, Stöbe submitted 26 reports on foreign policy that were considered by Soviet intelligence as being "valuable". A report from Alta on 7 May 1939, states
"Alta reports: The DNB representative in Warsaw, Jaensch, who is primarily concerned with the Ukrainian question in Poland, is being informed by Kleist about German intentions regarding the front. Kleist reported that Berlin is currently considering how the Ukrainian problem could be most effectively exploited in the event of war. [...] The German concern is only that Russia could use the revelation of the Ukrainian problems as an opportunity to abandon its neutrality. In order to eliminate this danger, Berlin intends to give Russia credible and sufficient assurances that the raising of the German question in Poland will not be directed against Russia. It is intended to ensure that Germany has no intention of founding an independent Ukrainian state, but that it only intends to provide the Ukrainian population with extensive autonomy rights within the framework of a greatly reduced Polish state. Ilse Stöbe evidently maintains trusting contacts with the Posen journalist Erich Jaensch, who has been working for the German News Bureau (DNB) in Warsaw since 1936"