Elly Winter

Elly Winter (1 November 189813 May 1987) was a German communist and notable political activist. The eldest daughter of East German president Wilhelm Pieck, Elly Winter was a longtime activist in the anti-fascist movement and was a well-recognized member of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in East Germany after the Allied triumph over Nazism. Biography The first-born daughter of German Marxist activist and Social Democrat Wilhelm Pieck, Winter was born Elly Pieck in Bremen on 1 November 1898. Politically active from an early age, she joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1919 (Wilhelm Pieck had joined the newly founded Communist Party in 1918). She married Theodor Winter, a fellow activist in the Communist Party. Upon the Nazis' seizure of power in 1933, the Pieck family fled from the Third Reich. Having successfully obtained asylum in the Soviet Union, they stayed in Soviet territory until the 1945 surrender of Nazi Germany in World War II.