[1][2][3][4] Hermine "Minkerl" Schwarzer was born in Vienna a year before the outbreak of the war that would put an end to the Austro-Hungarian empire.
That year she took part in the "International Red Falcons Conference", held in Ostend, a port and coastal resort in the Flemish speaking northern half of Belgium.
[1] In 1934, the year both of the brief but brutal February uprising which presaged a further retreat from democracy in the country and of Hermine Schwarzer's twenty-first birthday, she teamed up with the Young Communists, becoming a local group leader for Vienna-Margareten ("Vienna 5").
By this time she was already a member of the (illegal) Communist Party, and she was assigned the highly dangerous work of creating and maintaining contacts between the leadership cells on the various regions of Austria.
She also found time to attend evening classes at a "Maturaschule", a college preparing post-school students for the secondary school leaving exam which, once passed, would normally have opened the way to a university-level education.
[5] "People's Courts" had been revived and "brought up to date" by the Hitler government after 1933 in order to deal with cases determined to be of a "political" nature.
Two of the accused prisoners faced the double charge of "Advantaging the enemy and preparing to commit high treason" ("Feindbeguenstugung und Vorbereitung sum Hichverrat").
Their two co-accused, Hedrich's wife Erna and Margarete Bronobhadny (who had no previous court record of political dissent) were also deemed to have been complicit, but they received only lengthy jail sentences.
Instead, after two months in custody in Vienna, she was transferred to the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück, a short distance to the north of Berlin, where she was detained till May 1945.
[9] At the start of October 1943 Hermine Zaynard wrote a letter to her father, her parents-in-law, "sweet Liesserl" (possibly a sister) "and all others who have lived me".