Mathilde Wurm

Mathilde Wurm ( Adler; 30 September 1874 – 31 March or 1 April 1935) was a German politician, social worker and journalist. She represented the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany in the Reichstag from 1920 to 1933.

Life and career Wurm was born Mathilde Adler in 1874 to a Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main. She moved to Berlin and began working as a social worker in 1896. She was particularly interested in helping girls to receive vocational training, which led to her co-founding Berlin's first apprenticeship placement and counselling service for female school-leavers. In 1904 she married , a journalist who later entered politics.

Wurm was involved in socialist circles from a young age, and was a longstanding member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDP). After marriage, she mainly worked as a journalist and was active in the women's movement of the SPD, through which she regularly corresponded with Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and Luise Kautsky. In 1919 she was elected to the (Berlin City Council). When her husband Emanuel died in 1920, Mathilde assumed his seat in the Reichstag Ministry of Food under the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD).

The case was covered in the British press and presumed to have been a double suicide by barbitone poisoning. Due to the suspicious circumstances surrounding the two women's deaths and the lack of a motive, some observers suggested that they had been killed by Gestapo officers, but a coroner's inquest resulted in a verdict of "suicide while of unsound mind".