[6][7] The Austrian Communist Party was founded on 3 November 1918 by Ruth Fischer and Paul Friedländer, a medical student she married in 1917, who later died in a Nazi prison or concentration camp.

Eight days later, she claimed, a crowd of rioters proclaimed her editor of Vienna's largest daily, the Neue Freie Presse, and she was arrested and charged with treason, but released under amnesty.

She opposed the failed attempt to seize power in Austria in June 1919 instigated by the Hungarian communist Erno Bettelheim, and during the recriminations that followed, she left her husband and moved to Berlin.

She visited the Comintern representative Karl Radek many times while he was interned in Moabit prison, acting as his contact with the Communist Party of Germany.

"[14] Although she appeared to represent a minority view in the Communist Party of Germany at that time, Comintern ordered that she should be co-opted onto its Central Committee in April 1923.

In 1923, Fischer appealed to a group of Nazi students, proclaiming that "Those who call for a struggle against Jewish capital are already, gentlemen, class strugglers, even if they don’t know it.

On the contrary, we must calm the masses, hold back our people in the factories and the unemployed committees until the government thinks the moment of danger has passed.

[19] During the power struggle in the Soviet Union following the death of Lenin, the trio backed the Comintern chairman Grigory Zinoviev, who at that time was aligned with Joseph Stalin, against Trotsky and Radek.

At the sixth congress of the KPD, in 1925, she went on to attack the two most famous martyrs of German communism, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht for having "burdened us with great errors which we must eradicate."

[20] By August 1925, Zinoviev and other soviet leaders had decided that Fischer and Maslow were unreliable, and the executive of Comintern passed a resolution attacking them by name, without mentioning Thälmann.

[22] When the executive of Comintern held a special session, private letters she had written, which had been intercepted by the censorship were read out, including one to Maslow, in which she wrote "We are condemned to death, since terror reigns in Leningrad.

Under code-named "Alice Miller," she was considered a key Pond agent for eight years,working under her cover as a correspondent, including for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

"[26] Isaac Deutscher, a biographer of Trotsky and Stalin, described her as a "young, trumpet-tongued woman, without any revolutionary experience or merit, yet idolized by the Communists of Berlin.

[5] She had one child, Friedrich Gerhart Friedländer (F.G. Friedlander), born in Vienna 1917, later a mathematician & Fellow of the Royal Society,[28] who died in the United Kingdom in 2001.