[1][2][3][4] Although the number of people who died under similar circumstances is incalculably large, one of several things that marks out the case of Käthe Niederkirchner is the extent to which she was celebrated by public authorities after her death.

[1][3] Her father, Michael Niederkirchner (1882-1949) was an industrial worker active in the trades union movement who had moved with his wife to Berlin in 1906, having been born a member of the German-speaking minority community in Budapest.

[2] According to Käthe's niece, Käte Niederkirchner, Helene was "sold into domestic service" when she was 11, after which she was employed as a maid with a respectable middle-class family in Hungary.

The phrase "sold to America" ("nach Amerika verkauft") comes from Käthe Niederkirchner's niece, a pediatrician-politician, named after her aunt.

[a][4] While the children were still small their father was conscripted into the army and sent to the Russian front, though he would later proudly recall that he never fired a gun at anyone in a war which was being waged by the rich against the poor of every land.

But her favourite piece of literature was the collected volume of letters written from prison by the assassinated communist heroine Rosa Luxemburg.

[2][3] After leaving school she responded to her father's insistence that each of his children should master a trade by completing an apprenticeship in garment manufacturing ("Schneiderlehre").

However, in October 1929 the Wall Street Crash heralded a Great Depression, exacerbated by more than ten years of government mercantilism across the west.

She also mastered shorthand and worked on her foreign languages, attending appropriate courses at the Marxist Workers' Academy ("Marxistische Arbeiterschule" / MASCH) in Berlin.

A couple of months later, seizing an opportunity presented by several years of parliamentary deadlock, in January 1933 the National Socialists took power and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship.

Although the family still retained their Hungarian citizenship, Hungary had been moving towards fascism since the installation of Gyula Gömbös as miniszterelnök (head of government) in October 1932.

[5] The situation changed further in June 1941 when the German government unexpectedly (to most) repudiated an important existing non-aggression agreement launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union.

[7] However, it is unclear whether they were ever able to live together, since in the chaos of war party authorities moved Wieland, who had been badly wounded in Spain, to a home for invalids in Osh (Kyrgyzstan).

On the night of 7 October 1943 Käthe Niederkirchner celebrated her 24th birthday by jumping out of a Soviet military airplane in the countryside near Warsaw.

She was accompanied in the enterprise by a fellow activist called Theodor Winter, who was also the son in law of Wilhelm Pieck, a leader of the group of exiled German communists based in Moscow at this time.