Rosa Luxembourg murder case reopened

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Rosa Luxembourg murder case reopened
German prosecutors are re-examining the 1919 murder of the communist leader Rosa Luxembourg, amid claims investigators at the time replaced her corpse with that of another woman.
 

By By David Wroe in Berlin
Published: 4:57PM GMT 18 Dec 2009

Coroners from the state prosecutor's office in Berlin are to perform an autopsy on a headless corpse recently found in a basement of the city's Charite Hospital.

Charité's head of forensic medicine, Michael Tsokos, who found the corpse, has concluded it is Luxemburg's after extensive testing including carbon dating, computed tomography and bone isotope tests.


While no one is alive to answer fresh charges, a positive identification could change the history books, suggesting the fragile Weimar Republic government tampered with the investigation because they feared that anger over Luxemburg's murder could fuel a communist uprising.

Luxembourg, who helped found the German Communist Party and remains a revered figure on the left, was beaten and shot in the head by a right-wing militia 90 years ago, during a period of upheaval in Germany in which thousands died in street riots.

Her body was then thrown into Berlin's Landwehr Canal.

Although a woman's body was recovered and examined, Mr Tsokos said the accompanying post-mortem report is riddled with inconsistencies and describes a body that clearly was not Luxemburg's.

"There is no mention of the hip degeneration that Luxembourg had. It is also the wrong dimensions for her. The body we have found fits all these descriptions. It is also about the right age at which she died — 47. That's why I and many others believe it is Luxembourg."

Authorities at the time, eager to fast-track the investigation to limit the political fallout, had likely used the first female body they found in the canal and then pressured the Charite forensic examiner, Fritz Strassmann, to go along with it, Mr Tsokos said.

"He made the reports look like the authorities wanted them to," he said. "It was a very dangerous time in Berlin. There were a lot of riots and the government feared there would be a revolution."

Only one Freikorps soldier, Otto Runge, was convicted over Luxemberg's murder, for which he spent two years in jail.

The unit's commander, Waldemar Pabst, later claimed Chancellor Friedrich Ebert, who had been using the Freikorps against the communists, approved Luxemburg's murder.

Berlin state prosecutor's office spokesman Martin Steltner said coroners were approaching the newly discovered corpse as they would any suspicious death.

"Of course it's an interesting mystery and we hope we can clear it up. Maybe it is Rosa Luxembourg, maybe it isn't."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... pened.html