Otto Niebergall was born into a working-class family just outside Kusel, a small industrial town in the hills to the north-east of Saarbrücken.

Niebergall joined the "Red Ruhr Army", established in the area as a response to the Freikorps units of unemployed demobilised former soldiers which had emerged in the aftermath of military defeat, and which continued to be active despite the failure in 1920 of the Kapp Putsch.

[7] Widespread economic destitution returned at the end of the 1920s as the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash spread round the globe.

Niebergall nevertheless led and sustained the organisation in the region, as a result of which, in 1932, he received an eleven month prison sentence, which he served in Zweibrücken.

In the carefully choreographed aftermath of the Reichstag fire at the end of February activists and politicians associated with the (shortly to become illegal) Communist Party found themselves high on the government target list.

Between March and October 1934 Otto Niebergall did indeed travel abroad, in order to attend the Comintern's International Lenin School in Moscow.

[2] Barbara stayed behind, campaigning against unification of the territory with Nazi Germany, a matter which was nevertheless settled in favour of the German government by an overwhelming referendum vote in January 1935.

Niebergall was mandated to use his contacts to organise and deploy a group of volunteers and material in order to fight against a threatened Fascist take-over in Spain.

[8] War resumed in September 1939, and after eight months during which western Europe held its breath, on 10/11 May 1940 the German army invaded Belgium.

[7] By that time her husband had been deported to the south-west of France where he was interned at Saint-Cyprien in a camp set up a couple of years earlier to accommodate returning fighters from the Spanish Civil War.

This brought him into contact with Willi Kreikemeyer and Harald Hauser [de; es] in connection with fund transfers from the United States of America through the mysterious Noel Field.

ceased to be illegal in newly liberated parts of France and - at least in the Paris region which quickly became a magnet for refugees from further east - transformed itself into a desperately needed welfare organisation, providing support for the most acutely needy war victims.

[3] An important priority, even under circumstances in which communication could be hugely challenging, was for covert co-ordination to maintain contact with resistance groups inside Germany.

It later became clear that during the fighting which preceded the liberation of Paris in August 1944 he was in contact with resistance activists inside Germany plotting to assassinate Hitler.

As matters turned out the SED never gained traction further west, in the British, American and French occupation zones; but in 1946 Germany's semi-permanent postwar division was far from a foregone conclusion, and the Soviet backed authorities in East Berlin, increasingly mistrusted in the west, appear to have been looking for ways to use the SED as part of a scheme to bring the whole of Germany into the Soviet sphere of influence.

[1] In the western occupation zones Soviet-style communism found little support, but in the Saarland, with its concentration of mining and heavy industry, leftwing politics had deep roots: during and after 1946 the Soviets and their allies worked hard to enhance political links between the Saar Protectorate and the Soviet occupation zone (later East Germany).

[2] The Communists received 15 seats in the 1949 West German election, but over the next four years rising Cold War tensions, the involvement of Soviet troops in brutal of the June 1953 uprising over in East Germany, and a growing perception that the Communist Party in West Germany was not so much a movement focused on workers' rights as an ill-disguised tool of a threatening Soviet foreign policy all sapped electoral support.

[2] Despite continuing political rivalry, after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, at first imperceptibly, cold war tensions between the two parts of Germany became less acute, or at least slightly less unmanageable.

[1][6] In 1972 he was elected chairman of the "Interests Association of German Former Resistance Fighters ("Interessengemeinschaft ehemaliger Deutscher Widerstandskämpfer" / IEDW).