In the resistance: Annedore and Julius Leber

These premises are closely linked with the life story of Julius Leber and his wife Annedore.

Leber was an SPD politician and resistance fighter against National Socialism. After being re-elected as a delegate to the Reichstag in 1933 he was arrested by the Nazis and only released from the concentration camp in 1937. After his discharge he worked as a coal merchant at Torgauer Strasse. Leber was active in different resistance groups. He was denounced and on 5 July 1944 arrested by the Gestapo, sentenced to death in a show trial at the infamous People’s Court of Justice and executed on 5 January 1945 in the Berlin-Plötzensee prison.

The coal merchants

Annedore Leber carried on the coal business after the death of her husband. When the company’s buildings were destroyed in the Second World War she moved at first into rooms on the opposite side of the street at Torgauer Strasse 7. In 1950 she had a one-storey office building built on the property next to the former coal business. It also housed the publishers Mosaik-Verlag (until 1962), which at the time printed the most important publications on resistance against National Socialism. Annedore Leber had founded the publishing house at the beginning of the 1950s – against the zeitgeist of the time.

After the death of Annedore Leber in 1969 the building was leased to another firm and renovated several times.