Leo Bauer

Leopold Bauer was a German political activist and journalist, originally from Galicia. For reasons of race and politics he spent the twelve Nazi years in exile. That eventful period included more than one year locked up by the authorities in Switzerland where grounds for his conviction included "damaging [Swiss] neutrality". After 1945 he remained politically engaged. In 1953 he was deported by a military court in East Berlin to the Soviet Union for execution. In the event his sentence was commuted to a 25-year stretch in a Siberian labor camp. Then in October 1955, he was released to West Germany in the context of a general agreement between the governments in Bonn and Moscow for the return of surviving German prisoners of war. Leo Bauer later became a specialist advisor to Chancellor Brandt on East-West German relations ("Ostpolitik").