Mystery woman buried after link to communist icon unproved

Jan 14, 2010, 20:48 GMT

Berlin - German officials buried Thursday a woman's headless and handless corpse after a failure of attempts to prove that the remains were of a communist icon, Rosa Luxemburg, who died in the chaos at the end of the First World War.

The body had been preserved as a sample in a hospital pathology department for 90 years. Last year, a Berlin pathologist, Michael Tsokos, suggested the body was that of Luxemburg, who was shot dead by right-wing militiamen in 1919 and thrown in a canal.

Writer Luxemburg's memory is hallowed among German leftists because she was a co-founder of the German Communist Party.

Tsokos theorized that when the headless bodies of two dead women were recovered in the same month from the canal, city officials muddled them up and the wrong body was conveyed to Luxemburg's grave, which was destroyed two decades later by the Nazis.

But no compelling proof could be found for his idea. Luxemburg was killed after a communist attempt to seize control amid the collapse of the German monarchy when Germany lost World War I.

The city of Berlin's environment department said the still- nameless woman was interred in a grave at Neue St Michael Cemetery in the city's Tempelhof district.

Berlin public prosecutors ordered a fresh autopsy of the body several weeks ago, but pathologists found no evidence to prove the woman's identity. Why the body was preserved in the university hospital anatomy department in the first place also remains unclear.