The Alpenpost: A Girl's Guide to Fighting Hitler and Stalin

Historian Maurice Casey reveals the story of an anti-Nazi resistance network and the family at its heart, told through a newspaper crafted by two young girls.

In the dusty corners of a Galician villa on Spain’s northern coast, Casey uncovered a forgotten archive of revolution, resistance and love. Among the documents was something extraordinary. The Alpenpost - a newspaper lovingly hand-crafted by Elisa and Alida Leonhard, two girls raised on Europe’s 1930s refugee routes.

Created every fortnight from late 1935 until 1940, The Alpenpost charted the activities of the two Leonhard girls and their mother Emmy, a veteran of the repressed world of Weimar German communism. With a mixture of cartoons, light stories and precocious political analyses, the girls charted their unusual upbringing as the children of an anti-fascist father and an exiled revolutionary mother.

Each issue was posted to the girls’ ‘papa’ Edo Fimmen, separated from his family, constantly travelling to maintain a network of activists and informants. Fimmen led the powerful International Transport-Workers’ Federation in continual resistance to fascism. Reading The Alpenpost, Edo could chart his daughters’ flight through 1930s Europe. It was both a love letter to a father kept apart from his family by dangerous work and a remarkable document of a childhood lived in flight from totalitarianism.

This is a tale of survival against the odds - not only the survival of a family that lived under grave political threats, but an archive that survived a journey across countries and generations.

Contributions from Pedro Ewald, Dieter Nelles, Rene Dumont, Bob Reinalda
Voices of The Alpenpost: Hannah Nehb, Juno Nehb, Neva Nehb

Producer: Mark Burman
A Storyscape production for BBC Radio 4