[3] Kurt Samuel Rosenfeld was born at Marienwerder, a mid-sized town near Danzig, then in West Prussia into a Jewish[4] family.

Between 1896 and 1899 he studied jurisprudence and social economics at Freiburg (where one of his teachers was Max Weber), then moving on to Berlin from where he emerged in 1905 with a doctorate in law.

He was also building a reputation as a trial lawyer: during this period he defended in court like minded political comrades including Rosa Luxemburg, Kurt Eisner and Georg Ledebour.

Rosenfeld was among those who formed the breakaway faction, which later became the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany ("Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / USPD).

[1] During the year of revolution that followed the war Rosenfeld served briefly, between November 1918 and January 1919, as Prussia's regional justice minister.

Following the assassination of Walther Rathenau in 1922, many took the view that in the post war context of economic destitution, the residual USPD now had too much in common with the SPD to persist as a separate movement.

As the political temperature rose in the later 1920s, Rosenfeld was one of those urging closer collaboration between the SPD and the Communists as a way to counter the growing menace of right wing demagoguery.

[7] At the heart of the disagreement was the decision of the party leadership under Otto Wels to "tolerate" the Brüning government, in a desperate - and with the benefit of hindsight unsuccessful - attempt to "stabilize the tottering state" and avert a Nazi take-over.

[8] Rosenfeld and fellow-expellee Max Seydewitz now founded the Socialist Workers' Party ("Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands" / SAPD).

Outside Germany a number of political refugees organised an alternative "counter-trial" in London which took place in September 1933, and concluded that the real perpetrators of the Reichstag fire were the Nazi elite.