35 Facts About Susanne Miller

Susanne Miller was born in Sofia in May 1915, less than a year after the outbreak of the First World War.

When she was five Susanne was baptised as a Protestant, but her father's motives in arranging this seem to have been more social than religious.

Susanne Miller later recorded that it was here, while still a child living in one of the city's most affluent quarters, that she became aware of the huge social inequalities in the Austrian capital.

In 1929 the family moved back to Bulgaria in connection with Ernst Strasser's work, and Susanne Miller Strasser switched to the German School in Sofia.

Susanne Miller's socialism was based not so much on the historical materialism of Karl Marx, as on simple ethical motivation.

Susanne Miller moved on to the University of Vienna, studying historiography, English studies and philosophy.

Susanne Miller joined the Socialist Students' Association, which few students in Vienna did during the early 1930s.

Susanne Miller made two further summer visits to London during the 1930s.

Susanne Strasser became Susanne Miller and acquired a British passport in 1939 by means of a "pro forma" marriage to a Labour activist.

Young Horace Miller was the boyfriend of Renate Saran, a fellow refugee from Nazi Germany and the daughter of Susanne's ISK comrade and friend Mary Saran, but Renate when reporting the matter later, made light of this.

Susanne Miller became a member of London's community of socialist exiles from Germany.

Susanne Miller herself presented a series of lectures to women from the English Cooperative Movement and from the National Council of Labour.

Fears of a German invasion of England had receded after the Battle of Britain 1940: the political work that preoccupied Eichler and Susanne Miller included drafting policy papers and speeches for a postwar Germany.

Susanne Miller was particularly moved by the murders by the Soviets in 1942 and 1943 of Victor Alter and Henryk Ehrlich.

War ended in May 1945, and Susanne Miller accompanied Willi Eichler back to what remained of Germany, settling initially in Cologne which was in the country's British occupation zone, and where Eichler was appointed editor in chief of the revived Rheinische Zeitung.

Susanne Miller was responsible, together with Marianne Kuhn, for planning the lecture programme: those accepting invitations to address the Socialist Education Association included Wolfgang Leonhard und Heinrich Boll.

The Academy, of which Susanne Miller served as president between 1982 and 1990, continued to promote the political philosophical insights of Leonard Nelson long after Nelson's death in 1927.

Shortly after the two of them moved to Bonn Susanne Miller was appointed to a salaried position with the party.

Susanne Miller was an exceptionally close observer of the process that ensued because she attended the commission meetings and took the minutes.

Once work had been completed on the Godesberg Program, Susanne Miller decided to return to the studies that she had abandoned as an eighteen year old in 1934.

Susanne Miller received her doctorate in 1963 for a piece of work, which was adapted and published as a book, on the development of the Party Programmes for Social Democracy in Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Susanne Miller dedicated this work to her friend, Minna Specht.

Susanne Miller worked at this non-university research institute right through till 1978.

Between the early 1970s and the end of the 1990s Susanne Miller was active as a confidential lecturer for the party's Friedrich Ebert Foundation and as a member of the foundation's committee responsible for decisions on bursary awards.

Susanne Miller had previously contributed to the foundation's activities as a frequent seminar leader and in a consultancy capacity.

Susanne Miller was concerned with questions of party collaboration between the two Germanies.

Susanne Miller was a member of the SPD "Basic Values Commission" which between 1984 and 1987 held meetings with members of the East German Academy for Social Sciences, which had originally been created in 1951 as an agency of East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany.

Susanne Miller was entirely open to this form of dialogue with representatives of the East German "socialist" party, but she was robustly intolerant of crimes and human rights violations for which she held the East German communists directly responsible.

The most important of the events organised under Susanne Miller's commission presidency occurred in 1987, and was a public meeting in the foyer of the SPD's Erich Ollenhauer Building in Bonn.

Beside her work for the various SPD party agencies, Susanne Miller worked for West Germany's Bundeszentrale fur politische Bildung.

Susanne Miller sat as a member of the bpb's advisory board.

Susanne Miller later insisted that she had succeeded, working together with representatives of the CDU and FDP, in shaping and over many years following a bi-partisan approach to political education.

Susanne Miller was already, by this point, a member of the Victims' Association.

Susanne Miller featured in the public arena because of her support and membership of the German-Israeli Society, and in respect of other issues and causes in which she believed.

Susanne Miller was among those who demanded that the German government and the German Economy pay reparations to World War II forced labour victims, and she bemoaned the failure of governments to take account of the expertise available from victims' groups.