Bernhard Steinberger (17 September 1917 - 16 December 1990) was a communist German-Jewish engineer and economist. After 1945 he became an East German political dissident, spending most of the period between 1949 and 1960 in prison for his critique of what he saw as the SED's flawed approach to socialism. He had, by this time, already spent the war years accommodated in a succession of "emigrants' camps" in Switzerland, where he had arrived from Milan with his mother and sister in 1938 in order to escape the effects of newly introduced antisemitic legislation in Italy.
Biography Provenance and family Bernhard Steinberger was born in Munich where Dr. Max Steinberger, his father, worked as a prosecutor at the district courthouse. However, Bernhard's father died a couple of weeks after Bernhard was born. After the war his mother remarried which led to the birth of a sister five years younger than himself, but his mother's second marriage ended in divorce during the 1930s. After leaving school in 1934 he spent six months as a volunteer in an automobile repair shop before embarking on an engineering apprenticeship with Ertelwerk, a manufacturer of Precision mechanical products, in their factory in the western part of central Munich. He demonstrated a rare enthusiasm and talent for constructing model airplanes and dreamt of becoming an aviation technician or an aircraft designer. However, the National Socialist government which had taken power in 1933 were now enshrining in legislation the shrill racist rhetoric for which they had become noteworthy in opposition. The Steinbergers are described in sources as a family of secular or assimilated Jews: Bernhard's Jewish provenance made it unlikely that he would be offered a fulfilling job in the aviation industry, especially given the sector's important role in the government's re-armament plans. In July 1936, still aged only 18, Bernhard Steinberger emigrated to Milan, to be followed soon afterwards by his mother and sister.
Italy and exile In November he found an illegal badly paid job as a draftsman. Next came a design job with a firm making house building machinery. In October 1937 he finally obtained a design job with a manufacturer of road-construction machinery and tractors: the work was sufficiently well paid to enable him to support his mother and sister. However, antisemitic legislation to be set in place towards the end of 1938 put an end to hopes of a secure future in Italy, and Berhard Steinberger emigrated to Switzerland where visa requirements had not yet been introduced. He arrived in Zürich on 2 September 1938, followed a couple of weeks later by his mother and sister. They received financial support from Jewish refugee support charities ("Jüdische Flüchtlingshilfe"). There was no question of embarking on a normal life in Switzerland, however. They were classified as "tolerated migrants" ("tolerierten Emigranten") which meant that they were not permitted to look for nor to take paid work.
Switzerland Steinberger made good use of his enforced unemployment. During 1938/39 he attended lectures and took part in experiments for two terms at the Photographic Institute at the ETH (Federal Institute of Technology) in central Zürich. During 1939/40 he participated in a Metal Work course. He became a frequent visitor to the library at the Swiss Social Archives, also in the city centre. It was here that he met his first wife, a librarian. She was a member of the (recently banned) Communist Party of Switzerland. The marriage broke apart after a year and a half, but Steinberger's interest in politics continued to deepen. At the library he also became a committed reader of the weekly journal "Aufbau der schweizerischen Religiösen Sozialisten". Leonhard Ragaz, a leading theologian who headed up the organisation producing the journal, was an energetic man and a committed pacifist who also campaigned very publicly in support of the interests of recently arrived migrants. War broke out in September 1939. All the countries surrounding Switzerland participated directly in it apart from Liechtenstein. Switzerland was powerfully impacted. In March 1940 the Swiss parliament decided to revoke the blanket ban on paid employment being undertaken by "tolerated migrants" (refugees), but at the same time plans were set in train for the construction of labour camps to be administered by the police. In July 1940 Bernhard Steinberger was sent to the labour camp at Tamins, just outside Chur in Graubünden/Grisons. This turned out to be the first of six different labour camps in which he would successively be accommodated during the war. During that period he was able to obtain a work permit for work which he undertook as a designer for a total of twenty months. In the camps he came into close contact with German communists, and involved himself in some of their activities. That included trying to find ways to improve conditions in the camps and the establishment of the (very successful) "Emigrants' Cultural Community" ("Kulturgemeinschaft der Emigranten in Zürich e.V."). It also involved setting up (secretive) party cells and, as the war progressed, Free Germany groups in the camps. As the war approached its end Bernhard Steinberger was accepted into the German Communist Party at a conference held at Zürich in February 1945. In recognition of his participation in party work his membership was backdated to 1940.
Postwar Germany In September 1945 Steinberger was repatriated to Munich, which by this time was part of the US occupation zone. The Bavaria Communist Party ("KP Bayern") very soon sent him to take charge of "Economic Office B" ("Wirtschaftsamt B") in the Wasserburg district, in the countryside between Munich and Salzburg. Later, in May 1946, he was appointed Bavaria Communist Party district secretary for Wasserburg. He also took charge of the "Economy and Communities" department in the regional leadership of the Bavaria Communist Party. The next year the regional leadership sent him across to the Social Sciences faculty ("Gesellschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät" / "GwewiFak") at the University of Leipzig in order to undertake a Study course in Economics. The intention was that on completion of his studies he should become the Economics expert on the national executive of the national Communist Party. It was, even at the time, a little unusual for a leading party officer in the US occupation zone to cross the frontier into the Soviet occupation zone in order to study economics, but for the Communist Party leadership the political context at Leipzig was presumably an attraction. (It would take several more years before the frontier on the ground dividing East Germany from West Germany would become impermeable.)
In 1946 Berhard Steinberger married his second wife, Ibolya. The two of them had met in Switzerland, where Ibolya, secretly a Communist Party member, had found work as a house-maid/nanny. When the war had ended Ibolya's mother was still living in Felsőnána, in the countryside to the south of Budapest. In May 1947 Bernhard and Ibolya relocated from Munich to Leipzig with their infant son. At Leipzig Steinberger studied with Prof. Fritz Behrens, later remembered as one of the principal architects of East Germany's "New Economic System". Behrens rated Steinberger's abilities highly and was strongly supportive. It was probably during 1947 that Berhard Steinberger joined the recently constructed Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED). Steinberger would later look back on his time at Leipzig as the best time in his life, despite the food shortages and lack of heating. He prepared quickly for the appropriate state exams and made progress on a dissertation.
Arrest and detention of Iboyla Steinberger In October 1949 the region administered as the Soviet occupation zone was relaunched as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany). By that time things had gone terribly wrong for the Steinbergers. Ibolya Steinberger was arrested first. She was detained in Budapest on 28 May 1949 as a suspected spy. She was making her way home from a three-month stay with her mother in Felsőnána, which she had undertaken so that her infant son might meet his grandmother (and vice versa). In her passport she had carelessly placed a folded up copy of an article by Georg Markos which her husband had sent her to look after for the institute where he worked. It concerned "The Impact on state-owned industries of the Hungarian three-year plan". It later became clear that the article had already been published and widely distributed in academic circles: it contained no secrets. The men who arrested her at Budapest had nevertheless decided that she was working as a courier on behalf of her husband, who in his turn was working for "the Americans". A link was made to the activities of the American spy Noel Field who had been arrested in Czechoslovakia, amid much state mandated publicity, two weeks earlier. Ibolya Steinberger's travel patterns, taking in Hungary, Germany's Soviet occupation zone and Switzerland, fitted with the espionage hypothesis. In what she later described as "a state of diminished accountability" Iboyla Steinberger was persuaded to sign a false confession.Ibolya Steinberger, Schreiben an die Zentrale Parteikontrollkommissionder SED, 27. 6. 1956, p. 3 Two weeks later she retracted that confession to an officer of the Soviet security services, but the retraction had no obvious effect.