To his daughter's growing bewilderment as she grew up, and then to her enduring regret, his priority became to avoid losing his job with the city power supply company.
[3] In a later interview she insisted that there was no systematic gender bias within the group, but nevertheless pointed to examples of the ways in which having female members enhanced operational flexibility.
In Düsseldorf the political left had always been strong, and the distribution of (illegal) Communist Party leaflets through people's letter boxes was best accomplished using a perambulator.
Distribution was typically undertaken by teams of four, and while two comrades loitered at the ends of the street, the mixed gender couple actually delivered the material.
[3] Within the Düsseldorf resistance group, by 1935 she was working increasingly closely with Elli Schmidt ("Irene Gärtner")[5] and Heinrich Wiatrek ("Fritz Weber"),[6] both of whom had returned from Moscow, equipped with their party pseudonyms, the previous year.
[1] It was Wiatrek who proposed that Maria Wachter should also be sent to Moscow to undertake a course at the International Lenin School there: this would remove her from Germany at a time when it seemed arrest her by the Gestapo was looming closer every day.
In Amsterdam she was seized with self doubt, convinced that her fellow students would all be steeped in Marxist theory while she, having joined the Communist Party only in 1930, knew next to nothing about the relevant philosophical underpinnings.
During her time in Moscow she got to know several people who would later become members of the ruling elite in the German Democratic Republic, including Wilhelm Pieck and Herbert Wehner.
When the door to the train compartment burst open and the frontier policeman, accompanied by an SS colleague, asked to see her passport, she was able to pass it to him casually, while concentrating on her simple meal, thus avoiding exchanging looks with the officials and at the same time calming her own nerves.
Within Europe France was unusual in welcoming political exiles from Nazi Germany and permitting them to live in the country legally without having to marry locally, but following a change of government in April 1938 French liberal traditions regarding political asylum were thrown into reverse, and by 1939, even in France foreign passport holders were required to renew their residence permits each week at the local prefecture.
[2] They were then transferred to the large internment camp at Rieucros which had been opened in the south of France at the start of 1939 intended, at that stage, to receive political refugees from the Spanish Civil War.
Now Northern France was directly occupied by Germany while in the south, which included Rieucros, a puppet government administered a quasi-autonomous "free zone".
During the three months from December 1941 till February 1942[8] she was accommodated in a succession of 13 (as she later recalled) prisons, ending up back in Düsseldorf where she underwent extensive interrogation by the Gestapo.
Nora and Käthe, the supervisors for the machine to which Wachter was assigned, even provided her with newspapers which she could read hurriedly during toilet breaks, away from any Gestapo observers.
Additionally, after a year wearing the same (never washed) black dress with a yellow stripe, Wachter now had a change of clothes that even included a bra.
)[3] Towards the end of her sentence she was removed from the prison at Anrath and set to work at a munitions factory in Steinhagen where she took the opportunity to commit discrete acts of sabotage of the production equipment.
However, with the intensification of Cold War tensions that followed the 1953 uprising in East Germany and accompanied Soviet military intervention in Hungary in 1956, in August 1956 the West German Constitutional Court banned the Communist Party.
For many years she worked full-time in Frankfurt at the West German office of the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime ("Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes" / VVN) and its successor organisation, eventually becoming its honorary president for North Rhine-Westphalia.