[1] By the time the Nazis took power early in 1933 Mathilde Jacob had for most purposes retired into obscurity, but her personal history of communist activism and her Jewishness nevertheless made her vulnerable.

Following Jacob's death, the authorities attending to her confiscated assets recorded a claim from her landlord that she was liable to pay for some repairs on her apartment, also noting that rent on the property had not been received for three months.

Clients for whom she typed up manuscripts included the political radicals Julian Marchlewski, Franz Mehring and, from 1913, the influential philosopher Rosa Luxemburg.

[5] It is also clear that Luxemburg, who had not been convicted but for much or all of this time was simply being detained in "protective custody" was able to receive visitors and was not prevented from writing copiously while she was in prison.

[6] Jacob was able to smuggle several important manuscripts out of the jail, including the "Spartacus letters" ("news sheets")[7] and the "Junius Pamphlet", Luxemburg's important critique of the crisis unfolding in the Social Democratic Party, in the wake of the party leadership's decision to agree what amounted to a parliamentary truce, notably on matters involving funding for the war, for its duration.

[2] However, although the Junius pamphlet subsequently became something of an iconic document, at the time it proved impossible to find a publisher for it till after Luxemburg's (temporary) release from prison in 1916.

[6] From 1917 Mathilde Jacobs also worked intensively with Luxemburg's political associate Leo Jogiches: their collaboration lasted well into the revolutionary period that Germany experienced directly after the war.

With the savage aftermath the Russian Revolution still fresh in the minds of all concerned, the new German government ordered the immediate destruction of the left-wing uprising: the implementation of this instruction involved the killings by a Freikorps cavalry unit, on 15 January 1919, of both Luxemburg and Liebknecht.

Mathilde Jacob and Luxemburg's friend, Wanda Marcusson, were summoned to corroborate its identification, which they did, largely on the basis of the dress and blue medallion accompanying the badly decomposed corpse.

n her release from detention in September 1919 she moved to Stuttgart and joined up with Clara Zetkin, with whom she worked on the editorial content of the magazine "Kommunistin" ("[female] Communist").

[3] For many years it was known that she died there, but it is only recently, following the discovery and review in Israel of some records recovered from Theresienstadt, that her precise death date, 14 April 1943, was identified.