Born: 27 January 1901, Germany
Died: 20 September 1978
Country most active: Germany, Austria, France
Also known as: Lilly Korpus
The following bio was written by Emma Rosen, author of On This Day She Made History: 366 Days With Women Who Shaped the World and This Day In Human Ingenuity & Discovery: 366 Days of Scientific Milestones with Women in the Spotlight, and has been republished with permission.
Lilly Becher (formerly Korpus) was a German writer, journalist, and committed communist activist. She’s known for being one of the first anti-Nazi authors who documented the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany during the 1930s. Lilly was married to the famous writer Johannes Becher and gained significant recognition in East Germany as a writer in her own right.
In 1933, she moved to Vienna as Hitler took power in Germany. After a year there, she went to Paris to work at Éditions du Carrefour publishing. She played a key role in raising awareness about the suffering of German Jews under the Nazis. Her work was in the 1936 collection “Der Gelbe Fleck: die Ausrottung von 500000 dt. Juden” (The Yellow Spot: the extinction of 500000 dt. The Jews), one of the earliest documentaries on this topic. Lion Feuchtwanger wrote the book’s foreword.
In Paris, she met and married Johannes R. Becher, a poet and fellow refugee from the Nazis. They moved to the Soviet Union, where they stayed until 1945. Both joined the National Committee for a Free Germany after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. After Germany lost World War II, they returned to Soviet-occupied Germany.
From 1945 to 1950, Lilly Becher was the chief editor of the “Neuen Berliner Illustrierten,” a major East German weekly magazine.