Ilse Stöbe

In July, 2014, Germany's Foreign Ministry honoured Ilse Stöbe for her actions against the Nazis.

Shortly before the German invasion of Poland, she returned to Berlin from Warsaw and worked in the information department of the Foreign Office. There she met the journalist Carl Helfrich, with whom she lived until her arrest in 1942. According to her will, he was the tenant of her flat in Ahornallee 48 in Charlottenburg, Berlin.

Stöbe was arrested on 12 September 1942 by the Gestapo, allegedly for spying for the Soviet Union and for membership of the Red Orchestra (Die Rote Kapelle). A Gestapo report of November 1942, stated a radio message from the Soviet Union informed that a parachuted resistance fighter would come to her address. After seven weeks of torture she was compelled to confess to conspiratorial connections to the Soviet secret service and to people such as Rudolf von Scheliha. He was arrested on 12 October 1942. Both were sentenced to death for treason on 14 December 1942 by the Reichskriegsgericht, and executed on 22 December 1942 in the Plötzensee Prison in Berlin, she by guillotine and he by hanging from a meathook. The Soviet agent, Heinrich Koenen, who had landed in Germany by parachute, was arrested at her house by a waiting Gestapo official. Her mother was also arrested and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died in 1943. Stöbe's brother Kurt Müller was able to escape arrest and continue his resistance activities with the resistance group, the European Union Resistance. He was murdered in June 1944.

According to Helmut Kindler, she remained in contact with him as her childhood friend. During the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Stöbe met the Swiss publisher Rudolf Huber, who left her a major part of his fortune in his will when he died in 1940.

Gerhard Kegel, who was an employee of the Foreign Office in Berlin from 1935 to 1943, supported Stöbe in her clandestine intelligence activities after returning from Poland. She allegedly continued this activity until her arrest in 1942.

Initially, from 1930, Stöbe was a member of the reconnaissance group of Rudolf Herrnstadt, where he was listed under the name of Friedrich Brockmann, and from that time began to volunteer for Soviet intelligence under the pseudonym Arbin. In Soviet intelligence, Stöbe received the pseudonym "Arnim". During Herrnstadt's trip to Prague in 1930, she began to work directly with the Soviet resident in Berlin, Yakov Bronin, who was introduced to her as "Dr. Bosch."

In 1929, Stöbe joined the Communist Party of Germany. From 1931, she worked with Herrnstadt, who built up an intelligence group of the Am Apparat (Military section) of the Communist International, which in addition to him and Stöbe, Gerhard Kegel and his wife Charlotte Vogt, at times also the publisher Helmut Kindler and the lawyer Lothar Bolz all belonged. Together with Herrnstadt in 1934, they moved to Warsaw, where she worked as a foreign correspondent for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung until September 1939 and also wrote for other Swiss newspapers. Stöbe was then a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party) and in mid-1934 was appointed Cultural Attaché of the Nazi party's foreign office in Poland.

Ilse Frieda Gertrud Stöbe (17 May 1911 – 22 December 1942) was a German journalist and anti-Nazi resistance fighter. She was born and died in Berlin.