German corpse 'may be Luxemburg'

[IndianaGreen]

Source: BBC News

German corpse 'may be Luxemburg'

Page last updated at 16:50 GMT, Friday, 29 May 2009 17:50 UK


Luxemburg's official grave may have
contained the wrong body, experts say

An unidentified corpse found in the basement of a Berlin hospital could be that of murdered revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, say German authorities.

A pathologist at Berlin's Charite hospital told Der Spiegel magazine the headless corpse bore "striking similarities" to the left-wing icon.

Ms Luxemburg was murdered by right-wing paramilitaries in 1919 at the age of 47 and thrown in an icy canal.

Months later, a body thought to have been hers was retrieved and buried.

The grave, in Berlin's Freidrichsfelde cemetery, has since become a place of pilgrimage for communists, feminists and left-wing activists.

But Michael Tsokos, head of the hospital's Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensics Science department, told Der Spiegel that he doubted the identity of the corpse that was buried there.

He pointed to several inconsistencies in the post mortem examination his predecessors at the hospital had carried out on the interred body, which made him question its conclusions.

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8074334.stm

[MichaelHarris]

1. "the headless corpse bore "striking similarities" to the left-wing icon"

Elbow comparison?

[Kitty Herder]

5. That's what I was thinking. WTF?

Did she have a tattoo or something?

[MichaelHarris]

8. I've been wracking my brain

and for the life of me don't think I could identify a headless corpse, maybe they had funny feet.

[Gormy Cuss]

12. She had a hip problem and walked with a limp.

That would be evident from the corpse. If she had other know deformities or known broken bones that would also be evident. If the corpse was preserved and tissue remained there may be evidence of other conditions or illnesses she was known to have experienced.

[watrwefitinfor]

2. Thank you, Indiana.

I wonder if the truth of it will ever be known.

Wat

[oldironside]

3. What?

How is it possible that a corpse lies undiscovered in the basement of a German hospital for 90 years? I'm sorry, but Germans aren't stupid and aren't blind. This all sounds very fishy.

[kentauros]

9. That's the part I'm questioning more than identification.

That can be done by many methods of reconstruction. I'm sure there's some info we're not privy to that this pathologist finds to be compelling.

But how to keep a body in a hospital basement for 90 years and no one notices? I don't know forensics, but can you even keep a body that long without it rotting or dessicating? I'm guess it wasn't kept refrigerated either because of the time period she died and existing refrigeration technology or that such space is precious.

I'd be curious to see a more detailed account on this story :)

[Blue_Tires]

11. not saying this is the case, but

a lot of 100+ year old building have an earth floor for a basement, and maybe a shoddy makeshift wooden plank floor above that...or maybe the basement wasn't used, the doorway sealed off and its memory just lost to time or something

in the 90s, they were doing major renovations to an old building at the medical college of Georgia and discovered 60-80 corpses barely concealed in the earth floor basement -- as it turns out, the medical students of the 1880s-90s would rob fresh graves of black cemeteries for cadavers...

[David__77]

4. She should have led Germany along with Liebknecht.

Things could have turned out very differently. Unfortunately, the Spartacists weren't prepared well enough for the proto-fascist onslaught aided by "social democratic" traitors.

[freedomnorth]

7. But we can learn an very important lesson, to be a succesful revolutionary, one must be paranoid n/t

[No Elephants]

6. Murdered by right wing paramilitaries?

[1955doubledie]

10. What is that plane? It appears to have Russian insignia. nt

[No Elephants]

13. It was supposed to be a little joke. Mildly, momentarily amusing. Murdered by right

wingers=small plane, yadda, yadda. I figured they were all small planes then, so I just googled the year and "plane photo."