Maria Osten

Who was Maria Osten?

Maria Osten was a German and Soviet journalist. She was born on March 20, 1908 in Lemgo, Germany, but grew up in East Prussia. Her real name was Maria Greßhöner but she took a pen name, Osten to indicate her pro-Soviet sympathies.

Maria Osten was most famous for her 1935 book Hubert in Wonderland and the events surrounding its publication in the Soviet Union. The story is about a 12 year-old boy who is the son of German Communist from the Saar region of Germany. The boy is adopted by a Soviet journalist for Pravda, Mikhail Koltsov, and his partner, the German journalist Maria Osten, who took the boy in 1935 to the Soviet Union. The boy's arrival in the Soviet Union was a very highly publicized event at the time, as it was a demonstration of the cooperation of fellow Communists to save a young boy from having to grow up in Nazi Germany. The boy was toured all around the country and he was even taken to visit Marshals Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Semyon Budyonny in the Kremlin.

The family's fate, however, changed, when Joseph Stalin began to purge the party ranks.