Deba Wieland  Deba Wieland (25 March 1916 – 16 December 1992) was a left-wing German journalist. Between 1952 and 1977 she was in charge at the (East) German News Service ("Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst"). Deba Wieland was born at the height of the First World War, a year before the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk removed Russia from the war with Germany. Her father is described in sources as a German Trade representative based, at the time of her birth, in Moscow which is where she was born. Her mother worked as a book-keeper. From 1919 Wieland grew up in Riga which is where she attended and where in 1933, she passed her school final exams. She had already, in 1932, become a member of Latvia's illegal organisation. She studied commercial art in Strasbourg and Brussels. Strasbourg had been back in Germany since 1919 but remained for many purposes a German language city, and it was here that in 1933/34 she worked on the German language newspaper "Woman as Fighter" (""Frau als Kämpferin""). Meanwhile in Germany there had been a major regime change in January 1933 and the government had lost little time in moving towards one-party dictatorship. A feature of Nazi philosophy and of the new chancellor's own rhetoric, was a peculiar capacity for hatred, with Jews and Communists high on the target list. Deba Wieland was a Jewish Communist, joining the Communist Party in France in 1937. From 1936 Deba Wielland was a participant in the Spanish Civil War, but the focus of her life remained in Paris, by now the de facto headquarters of the German Communist Party in exile. Between 1937 and 1939 Deba Wieland worked in Paris as a freelance illustrator, also undertaking translation work for the CGT ("French Trades Union Confederation") and for L'Humanité, the Paris-based newspaper of the Communist Party. In 1939 she moved to Moscow. Around this time, or possibly some years earlier, she married (1907-1980), a fellow communist who had spent much of 1933 held in "protective custody" in Nazi Germany, and who subsequently, like her, had taken part in the Spanish Civil War. Deba Wieland worked as a translator and teacher at the sanitorium at Peredelkino which the Soviets had set up for Spanish Civil War veterans, and where Heinz Wieland was convalescing from serious wounds incurred in the fighting.