Hans Tittel was born in Glashütte, Saxony in 1910; in 1930 he fled the unemployment that afflicted Germany during the Great Depression by going to the USSR to work as a trained clock mechanic. He worked for the First State Clock Factory in Moscow, advanced to the rank of brigadier and studied in the Workers’ Faculty. He and Larissa Smirnova started a family. Their son Albert was born on 22 March 1938, two days after Hans Tittel’s arrest. On charges of spying for the Germans and sabotaging production he was sentenced to ten years in camp and sent to the Kolyma Region. He died in the camp the same year.