Lotte Ulbricht

Who was Lotte Ulbricht?

Lotte Ulbricht was a Socialist Unity Party of Germany official and the second wife of the East German leader Walter Ulbricht.

Charlotte Kühn was born the younger of two children in Rixdorf in 1903. Her father was an unskilled labourer and her mother a homeworker in Berlin. After attending primary and middle school, she worked as an office worker and a shorthand typist. In 1919, she joined the Free Socialist Youth movement, and in 1921, the Communist Party of Germany. She worked for the Party's central committee and in 1922-23, was a shorthand typist with the Communist Youth International in Moscow. Kühn was thereafter a member of the central committee of the KPD and the KPD Reichstag group. In 1926-27 she was archivist with the KJI and then until 1931, secretary and shorthand typist at the Soviet Union's bureau of commerce in Berlin. In 1931, she emigrated to Moscow with her first husband, Erich Wendt. She became an instructor with the Comintern and completed a distance learning study at the Academy of Marxism-Leninism and an evening course at Moscow State University.