He was involved in the theft of certain sensitive documents from Colonel Freyberg, a White Russian emigrant based in Berlin.

However, on 11 April 1928, a band of Communists, including his then-lover Olga Benário, succeeded in staging his jail break.

Braun enrolled in the Frunze Military Academy while Benário worked as an instructor at the Communist Youth International, first in the Soviet Union, then in France and England, where she participated in coordinating anti-fascist activities.

She went on to marry the famous Brazilian revolutionary leader Luís Carlos Prestes and moved to his country.

She was later arrested by the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship and extradited to Germany, where she was eventually taken to the gas chamber at the Bernburg Euthanasia Centre.

In 1932, following his graduation at the Frunze Academy, Soviet Military Intelligence's Fourth Directorate dispatched Braun to Harbin in Manchuria, China.

In the later part of 1934, Braun/Li De assumed a position of command in the early First Front Army, together with Zhou Enlai and Bo Gu, with authority to make all military decisions.

The First Front Army's suffered great casualties and so CCP forces fell drastically from 86,000 to about 25,000, within a year.

In 1935, the CCP met at the Zunyi Conference, where Mao Zedong and Peng Dehuai expressed their opposition to Braun, Bo Gu and their tactics.

Mao already distrusted European advisors from the Comintern, especially since in the 1920s advisers such as the Dutch Henk Sneevliet had given disastrous advice[clarification needed] to the CCP.

No longer holding a military command, he was mainly involved in advisory work and some teaching of tactics.

On 28 August 1939, Braun left for the Soviet Union and never saw Li Lilian again [citation needed].

At the time a very dangerous place for foreign communists, many of whom, including German communists, were imprisoned, tortured or killed by Joseph Stalin's secret police (NKVD), despite being completely loyal to the revolutionary cause and having often undergone persecution for its sake in their own countries.

[citation needed] The Moscow Foreign Languages Press gave him employment as an editor and translator.

His return to the authorities' good books was evident when in 1964 the ruling party's organ Neues Deutschland carried the revelation that the otherwise unknown Li De, involved in the Chinese Long March of the 1930s, had been in fact none other than the German Otto Braun.

As mentioned, researchers consider these as full of interesting information, particularly useful as offering a different angle to that of official CCP historiography – but in themselves far from objective or impartial.