Her mother, Anna, fled from her father and raised her children by fortune telling and minor crimes.

After her mother was arrested, Niehoff and her brother Amando lived in a Catholic orphanage until she was 14 when she began work as a trainee clerk.

[3] During that year Niehoff started working as a prostitute in the red light district of Hamburg, St. Pauli and in the Herbertstraße.

She appeared on German TV talk shows campaigning for prostitutes and legalisation of the profession from the 1970s onwards.

[2] Niehoff died in February 2009 from lung disease and complications from diabetes in a Hamburg hospital.