As a concentration camp and death march survivor, she wrote several works that chronicle her experiences during Nazi rule in Germany.
Her early childhood was spent in the little village of Nebersdorf with her grandmother, an ethnic Croat, in Burgenland, to the south of Vienna.
[5] The so-called self-elimination of the Austrian Parliament in March 1933 had eerie parallels with developments in Germany following the régime change in Berlin a couple of months earlier.
For many Austrians the 1920s, culminating in exacerbation of the austerity that had followed military defeat in 1918, had been a difficult and disappointing decade, and in 1933 there was a widespread hope that a post-democratic future under Austrofascism could hardly be worse.
Agnes and Johann Smudits were both politically committed, in opposing both Austrofascism and, after the annexation of 1938, the National Socialist ("Nazi") dictatorship.
Because political opposition was becoming illegal, anti-government activists were increasingly forced to operate in secret and beyond the confines of mainstream society.
Even as a young school girl Käthe was involved in the production of political leaflets for "distribution" in the city (for instance through being left on trains at the station near their home or on public benches along the streets or in parks).
[5] Looking back on these times after the National Socialist nightmare seemed to be over, Sasso, her own anti-capitalist credentials undimmed, would insist that people "had not understood or had not wished to understand that the problem was capitalism.
Käthe, now aged fifteen, remained active in the resistance group centred round Gustav Adolf Neustadl, as before.
She was held in solitary confinement for a month, and subjected to further interrogation during the course of which, she believed, she managed to avoid disclosing anything important to her questioners.
In the end she managed to obtain a transfer back to the "Liesl" prison [de] in the heart of Vienna, where she had already been detained for the first four months following her arrest.
Nevertheless, early in 1945, the German camp controllers began picking out older women for deportation to a recently established extermination facility in the nearby Uckermark district.
This was a response by the German authorities to the seemingly unstoppable advance from the east of the Soviet forces which were already fighting their way into the suburbs of Berlin.
On the first night of the march Käthe and her friend Mizzi Bosch managed to escape, after which they made their way on foot back towards Vienna.