Käthe Leichter

Marianne Katharina "Käthe" Leichter (20 August 1895 in Vienna, Austria – February 1942) was an Austrian Jewish economist, women's rights activist, journalist and politician. She was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Austria and the Viennese Labour Chamber. She was detained in Ravensbrück concentration camp during the Nazi regime and killed by gas at the Bernburg Euthanasia Centre in 1942.

Early life Leichter was born Marianne Katharina Pick in 1895 in Vienna, the second daughter of a Jewish couple, lawyer Josef Pick (1849, Náchod1926) and his wife Charlotte "Lotte" Rubinstein (1871, Galați1939). Her older sister was the Austrian-American composer and music therapist Vally Weigl.

Käthe graduated from the Beamten-Töchter-Lyceum in 1914 and subsequently began studying political science at the University of Vienna. Since, at the time, Austrian women were not allowed to graduate, she transferred to the German Heidelberg University in 1917; she graduated in July 1918 before returning to Vienna to complete two further semesters at the university.

Political career Leichter became involved in the Wiener Jugendbewegung (Viennese Youth Movement), a radical left-wing organisation, as a student prior to the outbreak of World War I, and was later a member of the Parteischüler-Bildungsverein Karl Marx (Karl Marx Association for Party Scholars and Education), a Marxist group for Social Democratic Party of Austria (SDAPÖ) members who opposed the war. When the Republic of Austria was founded in 1918, and as one of the first Austrian women political science graduates to have specialised in economics, she joined the Reichswirtschaftskommission der Arbeiterräte (State Economic Committee of the Workers' Councils), (State Committee for the Socialisation of Industry) and the Zentralverband für Gemeinwirtschaft (Central Organisation for Public Goods and Corporations), as well as working for the Ministry of Finance.

Personal life

She married , a fellow socialist and journalist, in 1921. She gave birth to their first son, Heinz, in 1924 and their second, Franz, in 1930. An annual prize awarded by the Austrian government to a woman historian is also named in Leichter's memory. Austrian-American historian Gerda Lerner wrote that Leichter "personifies the highest ideals of feminism—lifelong activity on behalf of all women, but especially working-class women; conviction that social reforms are only just if they serve the interests of women as well as men; uncompromising struggle against fascism and National Socialism, which cost her life." ∞ Henriette Rosenfeld, (, ) (1848, (, ), Nyitra Co. Royal Hungary1934, Vienna, Austria), and had the following children: Charlotte "Lotte" Rubinstein (married Käthe Leichter's father Josef Pick) Caroline Friederike Rubinstein (married name Landau) Helene Rubinstein (married name Kux) Heinrich Rubinstein Artur Rubinstein