During the first part of her life the family lived in the working class inner city Wedding quarter, but by the time war broke out in July 1914 they had relocated to Mariendorf, a manufacturing town then on the southern edge of Berlin, and subsequently subsumed into it.
In 1919 Kraushaar joined one of the Freie sozialistische Jugend (Free Socialist Youth) movements proliferating in the political and social turbulence that followed the end of the war.
The next year she became a member of the newly formed Kommunistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands (KJVD / Young Communist League), later becoming president of its Mariendorf district branch.
[4] A bizarre aspect of her career at this time was that she worked in a room that the party had rented for her in a large residential apartment in Berlin's respectable but otherwise unremarkable Friedenau quarter.
[4] Work in the BB-Apparat also brought her into contact with Wilhelm Bahnik [de], another Communist activist who would oppose the Nazi government and in the end was killed in 1938 while participating in the Spanish Civil War.
From 1937 she was also working for a news agency headed up by Bruno Frei called "Nouvelles d'Allemagne" / "Deutsche Informationen",[1] described as the press organ of the German People's Front (Volksfront) in Paris.
[10] Fellow internees included Irene Wosikowski and Thea Saefkow [de], exiled German communists who had been based with Kraushaar in France ever since the three women had been sent to Paris from Moscow at the end of 1935.
[11] From December 1940, Kraushaar was working with Otto Niebergall who was the leader of the "Comité „Allemagne libre“ pour l'Ouest" (CALPO), a movement based in southern France which operated as a branch of the Moscow-based National Committee for a Free Germany ("Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland" / NKFD).
[13] In November 1943 Kraushaar moved her own base to Marseilles, continuing her work for the German Communist Party in exile as a contributor to a newspaper entitled "Unser Vaterland".