Probably in February or March 1933, Oesterreich and Reich - whom the authorities classified as Jewish - emigrated to Prague together with their small daughter, and taking a route shared by thousands of others with a record of left-wing political activism during the years of the German democracy.

Nevertheless, she remained politically connected, having in 1934 joined the SoPaDe group of exiled German former socialist leaders and activists in Prague.

Having established a link with the SHEK she suggested to them that they should recruit as helpers some of the other children and young people from Germany who had ended up in semi-destitution in Prague.

Under her direction, starting in October 1936, additional food rations and clothing, along with medical care, holiday camp provision, and other necessary support measures were organised for approximately 130 children of the German refugees in Prague.

[3][6] However laudable in its own terms, however, Oesterreich's work for the SHEK and refugee children in Prague between 1935 and 1938 did nothing to address the challenge of finding the means to her daughter.

Their shared objective was to achieve political unity within the German working class and join in the fight against Fascism and National Socialism.

In May 1938 Ruth Oesterreich and her teenage daughter arrived in Paris, which like Prague and Moscow had become a popular place of refuge for German political exiles since 1933.

[2] Sources differ over their itinerary after they were made to leave Paris, but it is clear that they ended up in Verviers, a textiles town in the rugged hills of the extreme south-east of Belgium, close to the Belgian frontier with Germany.

Stephan Mathar was an industrial chemist by training and profession, and a former member of the German Communist Party who had switched to the SAPD and then fled with his wife to Verviers where he had successfully set himself up in a small business through which he had frequent contact with truck drivers passing through the town.

Despite - or possibly because of - being some distance from the principal international main roads at the time, Verviers was on a transit route favoured by many German truck drivers.

By engaging in casual conversation with drivers when they stopped for in town, Oesterreich and the Mathars were able to collect up-to-date information about life in Hitler's Germany.

They were also able to persuade some of the more sympathetic German truck drivers, en route back towards Aachen and Trier, to smuggle propaganda material into Germany.

[3] From Verviers Oesterreich herself regularly took trips back to Paris, where she was able to meet up with friends and former party comrades from her own years in the Communist Party, many of whom had broken off contact with Soviet former comrades, since Moscow had become a progressively more perilous place of supposed refuge for Germans, as more and more fell victim to the Soviet dictator's paranoia, irrespective of political beliefs and affiliations.

Her former husband had settled with his new wife in the United States in 1938, and now responded to the looming war clouds over Europe by trying to arrange for Ruth and their daughter to relocate to America, but his attempts failed due to a government quota scheme, restricting the number of refugees admitted by the US authorities.

[3][8] In May/June 1940 German forces over-ran Belgium, cutting off possible escape routes to France or, beyond, to the "free zone" administered after June 1940 by a semi-autonomous puppet government at Vichy.

The younger Ruth Oesterreich, her daughter, nevertheless had a Jewish father, which would have placed her at risk of being classified as a half-Jewish "Mischling" if she came to the notice of the National Socialists.

For Ruth Oesterreich the mother, falling into the hands of Hitlerites would have been no less dangerous, not for any reasons of race, but as a known former communist and socialist who had fled Germany in 1933 and subsequently engaged in various secret but effective resistance activities.

She nevertheless remained "active" during her time in Brussels after the German take-over, collecting information about life in occupied Belgium and passing it on to appropriate members of the emigrant community in Paris.

[8] Mother and daughter spent six weeks under interrogation at the Sint-Gillis jail (Brussels), which by this time was under the administration of the German police authorities.

General der Polizei Reinhard Heydrich, had firmed up a number of hitherto ambiguous definitional issues, in terms of government race policy, in respect of those identified as "half-Jews".

alongside Stephan and Elsa Mathar, her resistance comrades from Verviers, on 18 February 1943 she faced the special "People's Court".

[11] At least one source also mentions the (by this time routinely invoked in such cases) accusations of "advantaging the enemy and damaging national military capability" ("Feindbegünstigung [und] Wehrkraftzersetzung").

[2] She was accused in respect of her communist/socialists activism, her "espionage" on behalf of the discredited (and defeated) Spanish Republican régime, and her involvement with anti-Nazi circles in Paris.

The court nevertheless concluded - almost certainly correctly - that together Ruth Oesterreich and Stephan Mathar had smuggled propaganda material of foreign provenance into Germany.

Unlike her co-accused, Ruth Oesterreich took full responsibility for her actions, although she insisted that she had never had any involvement in "espionage", pointing out that information she had disseminated outside Germany was already accessible to anyone getting hold of German language emigrant magazines.

At the end of it the court summed up its verdict in respect of Ruth Oesterreich and Stephan Mather: "heir removal is ... necessary for the survival struggle that the German people are currently having to undertake".