[1] He and his three murdered comrades were rescued from anonymity thanks to a poem by Erich Weinert entitled "John Schehr und Genossen".

During the ensuing months of revolution the anti-war Spartacus League disappeared, but many of its members, inspired by events in Moscow two years earlier, now founded the Communist Party of Germany, formally launched at a three day conference held at Berlin between 30 December 1918 and 1 January 1919.

Then after the Moscow congress in December 1922 he remained in the Soviet Union for approximately one and a half years, supporting himself by applying the factory skills that he had acquired in Esslingen.

In July 1928 this organisation sent him to the United States of America where he "continued with his illegal activity"[4] In 1929 he returned to Germany, where politics were becoming increasingly polarised.

The Communists and National Socialists between them won a majority of parliamentary seats in the July election, but would not enter into a governing coalition together, and the more moderate political parties were for the most part determined not to collaborate with the extremists.

In the aftermath of the Reichstag fire it quickly became clear that the Communists filled the top positions on the governments' targets list.

During the night of 1/2 February 1934 these three, together with Erich Steinfurth (who had been arrested back in March 1933) were shot dead at the Schäferberg / Kilometerberg (hill) on the edge of Berlin by Gestapo personnel, allegedly "while attempting to escape".

In reality the murder was an act of quick retribution following the shooting the previous day of the government spy Alfred Kattner.

His career as a resistance fighter came to an end on 8 March 1942 when he was arrested immediately after leaving a suitcase filled with explosives outside the Salle Wagram which had been hosting an anti-Soviet propaganda exhibition ("Le Bolchevisme contre l’Europe").

A court martial show trial was conducted by the German occupation authorities in Paris between 7 and 14 April at which 25 of the 27 accused were condemned to death.

She then spent 17 days in the Santé Prison on the south side of Paris followed by a further six months held in Gestapo detention in Berlin, from where she was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in the damp flat countryside north of the German capital.

Although Eugen Schönhaar and his three fellow victims became heroic figures in the Soviet occupation zone (relaunched in 1949 as the German Democratic Republic / "East Germany"), the kidnapping and sentencing of their killer never made it to the national schools curriculum.

She was able to undertake extensive research in the scrupulously maintained files that the East German security services had carefully compiled and maintained during the intervening decades, and forced to accept not just that her father was the man who had murdered "John Schehr" and his comrades, but that this had been just the first in a succession of escalating atrocities for which her father had been responsible during the twelve Nazi years during what was, in its own terms, a highly successful career as a senior Gestapo officer.

[7][8] After the Second World War Eugen Schönhaar's earthly remains were disinterred and reburied in the "Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten" (area set aside for heroes of socialism)) in East Berlin's Central Cemetery.