In subsequent years, Pauker's successful rivals continued to blacken her reputation in the interest of bolstering their own political position. Within this dangerous political environment, even a veteran party member like Pauker found her position, and perhaps her life, in danger. When Communist dictator Joseph Tito of Yugoslavia broke with Stalin in 1948, the Soviet leader's suspicions of all Eastern European Communists reached a new peak. Another source of danger came from relations, marked by distrust, between the Soviet dictator Stalin and the leadership of the Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe. The Rumanian Communist Party was the setting for intense internal rivalries, and Pauker soon found herself confronted by such enemies as Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.

Nonetheless, her position was precarious. A cold and forbidding figure with a reputation as the most loyal follower of Joseph Stalin in Rumania, she was known as 'the Iron Lady.' Stalin himself described her as 'the cleverest woman Communist outside Russia.' Rising to the position of foreign minister, the first woman in modern European history to reach this high office, she became a key figure in her country's government. She returned to her native country in 1944 from exile in the Soviet Union and led the way in establishing a Communist government in Rumania. 1937) released from prison at request of Soviet Union (1940) reentered Rumania with the Red Army (1944) led Communist demonstrations in Bucharest (1944–45) appointed foreign minister of Rumania, helped to organize the Warsaw Pact (1947) attacked the heretical leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party (1948) named vice-premier (1949) treated in the Soviet Union for breast cancer (1950) purged from Communist Party (1952).Ī leading Communist for many years, Rumanian Ana Pauker played a crucial role in Eastern Europe following World War II. Studied for a period in Switzerland (1915–21) joined Communist Party (1921) elected to Central Committee (1922) imprisoned (late 1920s) in exile in Moscow (1931–34) imprisoned in Rumania (1935) husband executed in the Soviet Union (c. Born Ana Rabinovici in Moldavia in northern Rumania sometime in 1893 or 1894 died in Bucharest in June 1960 daughter of a Jewish butcher who held the status of rabbi in his community attended medical school in Switzerland for a period beginning in 1915 married Marcel Pauker, a fellow Rumanian student (died, probably in 1937) children: three.

Foreign minister of Rumania, one of the leading Communist officials in Eastern Europe in the period after World War II, who was the first woman to serve as Cabinet minister in charge of a European country's international relations.

Ein Lebenslauf by Marcel Pauker