[1][2] Wilhelm Knöchel was born into a Social Democratic working-class family on 8 November 1899 in Offenbach am Main, a short distance upriver from Frankfurt.

[1] In 1919, with the Weimar Republic affected by acute economic hardship and, especially in the cities, a succession of revolutionary uprisings, Knöchel joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

(It had been misleadingly identified in party communications as the "Brussels Conference" during the planning process in order to confuse the German security Services.)

most of the active members of the German Communist Party had either been arrested or had fled into exile, and in 1936, he was sent to Amsterdam where he teamed up with Wilhelm Beuttel to set up a "western leadership team" for the exiled party: most of the political activity in question was nevertheless undertaken, under conditions of extreme and growing danger, by comrades operating "underground" in the Rhineland, and most particularly in the Ruhr region where the focus was on communist resistance, organised through the (illegal) trades union movement in the economically important coal mines.

However, wartime conditions mean that communications channels between Amsterdam, where Knöchel had been living since 1936, and the remaining network of party activists across the border in Germany, were degraded or broken.

[1][4][5] On 8 January 1942, Wilhelm Knöchel re-entered Germany and, disguised as an itinerant specialist silver polisher, travelled illegally via Düsseldorf to the Ruhr region.

[2] During 1942, he undertook several trips to Düsseldorf, Essen and Wuppertal which enabled him to engage directly in political discussions with workers in a number of different factories.

[a][1] Wilhelm Knöchel and a relatively small number of his associates were the only ones who successfully made the attempt to establish a communist resistance group in Germany during this period.

[1][4] An attempt to lure him to a meeting, set up by his senior comrade Willi Seng a few days earlier, had failed because he was sick in bed.

[5] The hearing lasted just ten minutes,[3] and ended with Knöchel being sentenced to death, found guilty under the all too familiar charge, in those times, of "Preparing to commit high treason".

[4] Other members of the group, including Willi Seng, Alfons Kaps,[8] Alfred Kowalke,[9] and Wilhelm Beuttel[10] were sentenced to death at the same time.