Living "underground" (unregistered) she remained at liberty till July 1943, despite the intensely dangerous nature of much of her resistance work, which included approaching German soldiers and engaging in "political" discussions to try to persuade them to face up to the accelerating savagery of the Shoah.
Following her arrest Wosikowski was subjected to a sustained programme of torture and taken back to Germany, where she was executed at Plötzensee on the edge of Berlin.
[1][2][3][4][5] Judith Auer Irene Wosikowski was born in Danzig (as Gdańsk was known at that time) and grew up in a politicised social-democratic household.
At one stage Irene's older brother Eberhard (born in 1908) was forced by the family's poverty temporarily to leave middle school.
[6] In 1911 Wilhelm Wosikowski had received an employment ban ("Berufsverbot") in Danzig on account of his trades union involvement and the family relocated to Kiel.
During March 1933, irrespective of any residual legal niceties, the police and the courts began to operate on the basis that Communist Party membership was an act of treason.
[2] There is a lack of precision in the sources over her movements during these months, but at some point in 1935 she moved to Moscow where in September of that year she was enrolled on a two-year course at the Comintern's International Lenin School.
[3] At the end of 1937 the party sent Wosikowski to Paris where she worked as a typist and "political co-worker" in the editorial office of the "Deutsche Volks-Zeitung".
[10] For a time she also worked as a close assistant to Franz Dahlem (who after 1945 would enjoy a long - though not uninterrupted - career as a senior national politician in the Soviet occupation zone (of Germany) and the German Democratic Republic.
[3]) The French government granted Wosikowski political asylum, but they did not provide a work permit, so she was desperately short of money.
Irene Wosikowski was unable to comply with the requirement because she was arrested overnight on 12/13 May and taken to the Gurs internment camp to the south of Bordeaux.
[10] Probably as a response to the landing of large numbers of Anglo-American troops in North Africa, the Germans dusted off and implemented plans for a "direct military occupation of southern France.
[2][10] The newspaper comprised antifascist propaganda designed, with varying degrees of subtlety, to persuade German soldiers to lay down their arms.
Shortly after the German occupation Irene Wosikowski relocated (illegally) to a different part of the city and using forged papers took on a couple of new identities, as "Marie-Louise Durand" and "Poulette Monier".
[2][10] During the course of this activity, in or shortly before July 1943, Wosikowski, found herself chatting with a German sailor called Hermann Frischalowski from Cuxhaven.
[4][8][14] In the Fall/Autumn of 1943 she was transferred to Fresnes Prison, on the edge of Paris, where further unsuccessful attempts were made to induce her to disclose the identities of her Résistance co-activists.
It is impossible to image that the accused, who must be viewed as a cadre member, schooled in the methods and modalities of the Communist Party, really has no understanding of the organisation to which she belongs.
[14] The previous month Irene's mother Alice Wosikowski, who herself had several years as an inmate of a succession of concentration camps behind her, received notification from her daughter that she was back in Hamburg and the Gestapo had agreed visiting rights.
On 13 September 1944 the verdict and sentence were delivered by the court president Roland Freisler in person:[10] "Irene Wosikowski, an incorrigible communist for almost twenty years, underground militant in Berlin since the start of the National Socialist order.
Emigrant, pupil of the Lenin School in Moscow, which sent her to Paris, from where she hounded the [German] state with communist organisations till the start of the war.
[17] On 13 January 1948 Alice Wosikowski lodged a charge against the sailor at the district court in Stade Hermann Frischalowski, in which she accused him of a "crime against humanity and denunciation for political reasons, causing death".