Agnes Asche

Asche became a widow when her first husband died during World War I.^[1] From 1919 to 1923, she was active in the Sozialverband Deutschland (Social Association of Germany), which assisted war veterans. She was first a volunteer and then became a consultant in the main pension office.^[1]

In 1924, she became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, but by 1932 she was a member of the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany.^[1][2]

In the middle of 1933, while known as Agnes Jünemann, she joined the communist-oriented Committee for Proletarian Unity [de] and worked to distribute Klassenkampf (Class Warfare), the illegal newspaper put out by Otto Brenner and Eduard Wald.^[1][3][4] On 11 September 1934 she was arrested for high treason and taken to the Hanover court prison for pre-trial detention.^[1][2][3] In June 1935, she was sentenced to three years in prison by the Hamm Higher Regional Court as part of the larger procedure against Otto Brenner.^[1][4] She served her sentence in the Ziegenhain Prison near Kassel; she did not see her son for two and a half years.^[1]

After her release from prison in September 1937, she worked as a machine knitter.^[1] She remained active in resistance circles until the end of World War II.^[2]

At the end of 1943, she married Otto Asche, a local to the area who worked at the Braunschweig Coal Mine [de]; Otto Asche was elected as a socialist member to the town council of Offleben in 1946.^[1][5][6]

After World War II, she was a member of the Socialist Party of Germany, but she was expelled from the party in 1960.^[1]

A street in Ricklingen in Hanover was named in her honor in 1990.^[7][8][9][2]

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