In 1921 Maria Weiterer joined the recently formed Communist Party and started work, as volunteer, for the "Ruhr-Echo" newspaper in Essen.
However, she was increasingly pushed aside by Helene Overlach who advocated a more literal application of the RFMB's quasi-military role, which created a tension with Weiterer's more feminist agenda for it.
[3] In December 1935 she and Rädel were sent to Switzerland where they arrived before or during January 1936, and where they again under took "frontier work", taking on leadership roles in what sources identify as the party's "southern section" ("KPD-Abschnittsleitung Süd").
[5] They were arrested in October 1936 while the authorities were executing a search warrant against the International Red Aid (Soviet sponsored) workers' welfare organisation and expelled across the frontier not into Germany but into France.
Here Rädel and Weiterer became important members of the expanding leadership group of the exiled German Communist Party leaders which by this time was concentrated in Paris.
[5] While Rädel concentrated on work in the party central committee, Weiterer's focus was on the material and social problems encountered by the political refugees still coming out of Germany, their numbers later swollen by anti-Franco "Internationalists" returning from the Spanish Civil War.
The support committee for German political refugees created at the start of 1939 organised the collection and distribution of cash donations to help the destitute among the emigrants.
[5] By the end of 1939 war had been declared by the French government in response to the German invasion of Poland and Weiterer's refugee support committee had been banned.
It was nevertheless widely anticipated that large scale fighting would begin at some stage, and in May 1940 the German army did indeed invade, quickly overrunning the north of the country.
To the south, among the German communists interned in Rieucros sharp divisions arose over whether or not to obey the orders of their guards and so work for the French army, hoping that they might thereby be given political asylum and permitted to participate more directly in the fight against Hitler.
Weiterer was one of those rejecting this position, however, asserting that the only place they would expect to receive asylum was within the confines of a concentration camp, and that for the French government the war was an imperialist one which female communist internees had no reason to support.
[5] At the beginning of 1941 the French authorities began transferring those Rieucros inmates whose applications for exit visas had been successful to the "Hotel Bompard" in Marseilles, now transformed into a large transit camp where the refugees could stay while organising travel arrangements - generally via Lisbon - and entry visas - generally to Mexico which had already accepted large numbers of political asylum seekers following the Spanish Civil War, and would accept many more in response to this latest crisis.
Field had been sent to Marseilles from the United States by the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee to organise food and other practical relief for the political refugees who had ended up interned in southern France.
From Anna Esmiol, a gaullist agent who had managed to get a job in the Marseilles passport office, Weiterer learned that her name appeared on a list of individuals to be handed over to the Gestapo.
He had already been granted Soviet citizenship and there were plans to smuggle him to Moscow, but these were set aside in the context of the Stalin-Hitler non-aggression pact, and in the end he was extradited to Germany in August 1942 and executed on 10 May 1943 at the Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.
[4] In June 1942 the secret communist network in Vichy France decided to end Weiterer's clandestine stay in Marseilles and smuggle her to Geneva in Switzerland.
[3] Leo Bauer who had helped her was arrested by the Swiss in October 1942 and imprisoned because of his communist party activities on account of residing in Switzerland without any permit.
[1] Between April and November 1947 she was involved in setting up the Democratic Women's League ("Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands" / DFD), which under the Leninist constitutional structure being unrolled for what became, in October 1949, East Germany would be one of the Mass movements guided by the ruling party and entitled to send members (approved by the SED) to the national parliament (Volkskammer).
The key planners were a group of German Communist party members who had spent the Nazi period, including the war years, exiled in Moscow, and survived.
From the outset there was a certain mutual mistrust between the senior party comrades returning from Moscow, led by Walter Ulbricht and also including Wilhelm Pieck, and others who had survived the war years exiled in western Europe.
In September 1948 the East German leader Walter Ulbricht announced the creation of an SED Party Control Commission, mandated to "lead the fight against hostile agents in the service of foreign powers".
Back in Berlin there was by now a slow retreat from paranoia on the part of the authorities following the death of Stalin, which accelerated after what was termed (in the early days without irony) Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech" to the 20th Party Congress in February 1956.