Susanne later recorded that it was here, while still a child living in one of the city's most affluent quarters, that she became aware of the huge social inequalities in the Austrian capital.
[8] At the centre of her investigations was Leonard Nelson, the charismatic philosopher and mastermind of the International Association of Socialist Struggle ("Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund" / ISK), which he founded in 1926.
Through her aid distribution work she got to know Josef Afritsch, who two and a half decades later became the Austrian Interior minister, and Alma Seitz, the wife of a well-remembered former Socialist Mayor of Vienna.
[6] In the summer of 1934, Susan Strasser went to England where she worked as an au pair, not for a family but with a charitable institution run in East London by the Methodist Church, and known as the Bermondsey Settlement.
These included Jenny and Walter Fliess, Jewish refugees originally from Magdeburg, ISK members who were running a vegetarian restaurant in the City of London, in order to use the profits from their business to help fund German resistance against Nazism.
[12] In the summer of 1939, there was a widespread fear, especially among the growing refugee community in London, that during the coming war German armies would simply roll across Europe "without meeting any effective resistance".
Fears of a German invasion of England had receded after the Battle of Britain 1940: the political work that preoccupied Eichler and Miller included drafting policy papers and speeches for a postwar Germany.
One of the most memorable encounters was with Szmul Zygielbojm who in 1940 had vehemently opposed the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto, and who subsequently became a member of the London-based Polish government-in-exile.
[20] In the 1990s she backed Feliks Tych with his construction of a reading room in the Warsaw Institute for the History of Jews in Poland, placing on the wall there a memorial to the two murdered Bundists on behalf of herself and her (by now long since dead) husband.
[22] During this time she was working with other leading SPD politicians such as Herta Gotthelf, Elisabeth Selbert, Luise Albertz, Annemarie Renger and Louise Schroeder.
[6] Her activities in Social Democratic Party education work included participation in setting up and running the Socialist Education Association (Sozialistischen Bildungsgemeinschaft ) in Cologne, in which she worked alongside Eichler as well as the polymath-sociologist Gerhard Weisser, the future regional prime minister Heinz Kühn and Kuhn's wife Marianne.
[8] She was responsible, together with Marianne Kühn, for planning the lecture programme: those accepting invitations to address the Socialist Education Association included Wolfgang Leonhard und Heinrich Böll.
[12] It marked a dramatic change of direction for the Social Democrats, away from Marxist dogmatism and towards a pragmatic welcoming of the need to collaborate with market-economy capitalism on behalf of the people.
[24] She received her doctorate in 1963 for a piece of work, which was subsequently adapted and published as a book, on the development of the Party Programmes for Social Democracy in Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century.
[25] In this study she analysed the evolution of a Social Democratic party programme, starting with Ferdinand Lassalle's General German Workers' Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiter-Verein / ADV) of 1863, and tracking through to Eduard Bernstein and the Revisionist Struggles of the 1890s.
Instead she remained in Bonn, and in 1964 took a position with the "Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and of Political Parties" ("Kommission für Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien").
[28] Her study of the development of the Social Democratic Party memorably entitled "Civil Peace and Class War" ("Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf.
In addition she undertook a series of foreign study and lecture tours for the foundation, which on occasion took her as far afield as Japan, China, Israel and Poland.
These meetings produced the so-called SPD-SED Paper which spelled out the ideological differences between East and West Germany, invoking themes which had previously been excluded from east-west inter-German dialogues.
[6][35] In 1982 Peter Glotz, at that time the party's "Bundesgeschäftsführer", appointed Susanne Miller to head up the SPD Executive Historical Commission.
[36] Under Miller's leadership a number of events and presentations were organised on recent German History, and various booklets and leaflets were produced in support of these.
The most important of the events organised under Miller's commission presidency occurred in 1987, and was a public meeting in the foyer of the SPD's Erich Ollenhauer Building in Bonn.
West German media covered the conference intensively because an exchange of views focused on the direct ideological contrasts between western and eastern historians was seen to be very unusual.
Together with Thomas Meyer she led a working group at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation which compiled a three volume teaching compendium on the history of the German labour movement.
She later insisted that she had succeeded, working together with representatives of the CDU and FDP (parties), in shaping and over many years following a bi-partisan approach to political education.
She nevertheless eventually resigned from the bpb advisory board in 1992, asserting that party differences within it were making rational fact based discussion ever more difficult.
In 1996 she was appointed the chair her party's Working commission on previously persecuted Social Democrats (Arbeitsgemeinschaft ehemals verfolgter Sozialdemokraten / AvS).
[41] Miller featured in the public arena because of her support and membership of the German-Israeli Society,[6] and in respect of other issues and causes in which she believed.
When, in 1968, the journalist-author Sebastian Haffner published his historical work Der Verrat (The Betrayal), covering some of the political aspects of the succession of revolutionary events that occurred in Germany in the wake of defeat in 1918, Miller was savage in her public condemnation of Haffner's criticisms of the SPD leaders back in 1918/19, and of what she saw as his restricted vision the November Revolution more generally.