(1909-1944)
German Communist resistance fighter. Kathe Niederkirchner, a seamstress, was born into a working class family in Berlin on October 7, 1909. During World War I Niederkirchner’s father, a plumber, became a Communist while he was a prisoner of war in Russia. In 1925 Kathe Niederkirchner joined the German Communist Youth League and in 1929 she became a member of the German Communist Party. She was arrested on March 27, 1933, after Hitler outlawed the Communist Party. Following her release Niederkirchner emigrated to the Soviet Union, where her family had sought refuge from the Nazi regime. In 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, she joined the Red Army. Her appeals to German soldiers were broadcast by Radio Moscow and she was sent to prisoner of war camps to persuade soldiers to join the antifascist cause. In October 1943 she parachuted from a Soviet plane into German-occupied Poland near Warsaw. Her mission was to work in Berlin with the Communist underground. She made her way to the railway station at Kostiza. Her forged papers, however, lacked a stamp that the Nazis had just issued and she was arrested by the Gestapo. At the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, Niederkirchner was kept in solitary confinement and subjected to interrogation and torture for several months. She was then transferred to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, where she was chained by a leg-iron to a wall. On September 27, 1944, the camp commandant pronounced her death sentence, and she was executed that night.
