Helene Berner (real name Helene Welker: 13 December 1904 - 22 December 1992) was a gymnastics teacher who became a German resistance activist. She spent most of the twelve Nazi Years exiled in Moscow, where she took Soviet citizenship and established (or re-discovered) her connections with the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence). After 1945 she nevertheless returned to Berlin, becoming a party official in the Soviet occupation zone (relaunched in October 1949 as the German Democratic Republic / East Germany). Between 1949 and 1959 she was a senior officer at the Society for German–Soviet Friendship. She also became personal secretary to East Germany's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Georg Dertinger. Dertinger was not trusted by the party leadership, and it later emerged that Helene Berner was providing regular reports on him to the Ministry for State Security (Stasi).[1][2][3]
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