In 1945 the merger combining Germany and Austria was reversed at the insistence of the occupying powers whose military victory had put an end to the Hitler regime.
[3] In 1941 both Tilly Spiegel's parents were killed by the authorities in the Izbica "transit-ghetto", created that year in part of a village in the countryside east of Warsaw and Lublin.
Here she organised frontier crossing documentation for Austrian Communists transferring via Switzerland to Spain to fight with the International Brigades in the civil war which had been triggered in July 1936 when a group of Spanish generals had staged an attempt to overthrow the increasingly unstable government.
Instead of returning home to Vienna she now crossed the frontier (illegally) into France, settling in Paris where, until the outbreak of war, she supported herself as a gymnastics teacher.
[5] On 3 September 1939 France and Britain declared war on Nazi Germany: on the streets of Paris and London eerily little changed, as the governments in those cities waited to see what Chancellor Hitler would do next.
The answer arrived on 10 May 1940 when the German army invaded and quickly overran the northern half of France, taking over in Paris during the second week of June.
One returnee from the Spanish Civil War who ended up as a TA resistance leader was Franz Marek, a leading Austrian communist intellectual originally from Galicia.
Both these areas were in what then Germans had defined as Zone interdite, subjected to additional movement restrictions on local populations and higher levels of Gestapo and military supervision than most of occupied northern France.
[9][10] In 1943 the focus of her activities evidently returned to Paris: it was probably in August 1944 that she was arrested by the Gestapo and detained, like her husband, in Fresnes Prison, a short distance to the south of the city.
[3] In addition, she quickly engaged in the work of building up what subsequently became the Documents Archive of the Austrian Resistance ("Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes" / DÖW).
Spiegel worked on what had happened to women and girls engaged in antifascist resistance[15] and Rosenkranz studied Austria's experience of the November 1938 pogrom ("Kristallnacht").