Rosa Luxemburg's body likely found 90 years after murder

The head of forensic medicine, Michael Tsokos, told the magazine that a decapitated body without hands and feet – in possession of the hospital for almost nine decades – is likely the remains of the iconic left-wing leader.

The body shows “astounding similarities with the real Rosa Luxemburg,” he said.

CT scans of the corpse revealed that the woman was between 40-50 years of age when she died, and suffered from osteoarthritis and leg length asymmetry.

Rosa Luxemburg was 47 when she was murdered, suffered from a congenital hip dislocation and had one leg longer than the other as a result.

Tsokos told the magazine he doubts that the true Luxemburg was ever buried, substantiating his claim by outlining the numerous inconsistencies he uncovered in her autopsy report conducted in June 1919.

Tsokos’ predecessors examined a corpse that was buried as Rosa Luxemburg on June 13, 1919 in Berlin’s Freidrichsfelde cemetery, but he said records show this corpse did not bear her significant anatomical characteristics.

According to Der Spiegel, the coroners at that time explicitly established that the corpse they investigated had neither a hip defect nor legs of differing lengths. They also failed to find definitive evidence of rifle butt blows to the cranium or a gunshot wound – though Luxemburg is said to have been beaten to the ground with a rifle and then killed by a shot to the head.

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From Why 'Red Rosa's' fans got the wrong grave

The body discovered in the Charité's vault was only discovered by chance as Dr Tsokos was working on putting together an exhibit. A computer scan has revealed the body of a woman aged between 40 and 50, who had suffered from arthritis and had one leg slightly longer than the other. Dr Tsokos said he was now hoping to obtain a personal item of Luxemburg in order to do a DNA test and definitively confirm the body was hers. "A hat would be nice," he said, as it could contain strands of her hair.

Luxemburg was assassinated along with fellow revolutionary Karl Liebknecht. She died at the height of a post World War One leftist uprising in Berlin at the hands of German soldiers still supporting the exiled and defeated Kaiser Wilhelm II. The historian Isaac Deutscher described her murder as "Nazi Germany's first triumph", the celebrated playwright Berthold Brecht wrote a poem in her honour and Communist East Germany named a central Berlin square after her.

Most of the German left – ranging from Social Democrats to hard-line former East German Communists – have a special place in their heart for "Red Rosa". The notion that millions of her fans have been duped for 90 years by going on pilgrimages each January to a grave that does not contain her body was greeted with shock and consternation yesterday.

The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation said that it was "deeply dismayed" to learn that the body of an unknown woman appeared to have been passed off as Luxemburg. It blamed Germany's then Minister for the Army, Gustav Noske, for playing a " disgusting game with the dead" and urged the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel to "clear up the mystery and finally lay Rosa Luxemburg's corpse to rest".

Revolutionary heroine

*Imperial Germany's sailors started the mutiny that would lead to the end of the First World War. The German Kaiser was forced into exile and Rosa Luxemburg seized the moment and founded the German Communist Party.

*By January 1919, the revolution was turning violent and Chancellor Friedrich Ebert called in the Freikorps militia to crush the uprising.

*Decades after Luxemburg's death, the dissidents who helped to bring down the Berlin Wall were fond of quoting her maxim: Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter.