Käthe Leichter
Marianne Katharina "Käthe" Leichter (Vienna, 20 August 1895 – 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