Käte Niederkirchner (born Käte Appel or Käte Dienstbach: 30 January 1944 - 19 November 2019) was a German politician (SED / PDS) and pediatrician. In 1967 she became the youngest member of the East German parliament ("Volkskammer"). Her life was impacted by having been born with a famous aunt, the Communist resistance activist Käthe Niederkirchner who was killed by Nazi paramilitaries at Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944, and who was posthumously much celebrated by East Germany's political leadership.
Early life
Käte Appel was born at Chelyabinsk, an industrial city east of the Urals. "Appel", the family name by which she was known to comrades, was her father's party pseudonym. Her father's name had been Karl Dienstbach when he had emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1932 in order to avoid the prison term to which he had been sentenced at a district court in Frankenthal following his conviction on a charge of industrial espionage. During the 1920s Karl Dienstbach (1900-1977) had come to the attention of the authorities in Germany as a vociferous trades unionist and Communist activist. Käte Dienstbach's mother, Mia Niederkirchner (1911-1982), was also a political activist, living in Soviet exile at the time of Käte's birth. Her parents had originally met in the Hotel Lux in Moscow, which during the Hitler years had become a vast hostel for exiled German communists. During the final years of the war both her parents were working with prisoners of war in the Gulag network around Chelyabinsk, as political educators for the National Committee for a Free Germany. According to another source her parents were both working as officials at a prisoner of war camp, her mother as a secretary and her father as a cook.
In approximately 1946 the family were returned to Germany, settling in the region administered as the Soviet occupation zone, and in 1949 relaunched as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany). As a child she was often taken along by her mother to events celebrating and commemorating her Aunt Käthe (frequently identified as "Katja", which sounded more Russian than Käthe or Käte). As a close relative of this heroic figure she was frequently introduced to members of workers' collectives and brigades and to public officials at events arranged to highlight the renaming of a street or school or factory in honour of her aunt. Political engagement was "normal" for the family, as she later told an interviewer. As a school girl she was a group leader in the Young Pioneers. She successfully completed her schooling at the Käthe Kollwitz senior school (subsequently renamed) in 1962 and in 1963 enrolled at Berlin University to study for a degree in Medicine. She received her first degree in 1969 and her doctorate (still in Medicine) in 1970. Her doctoral research and dissertation concerned metabolic changes in the vascular wall characteristic of chronic Vitamin-D intoxication.
Political career
By the time she graduated Käte Dienstbach had already embarked on an unusually precocious career as a politician. She joined the party in 1965. In 1967 she married a fellow medical student, Jürgen Sima, who later became Head Physician at the hospital in Berlin-Weissensee. It was also in 1967, still a Berlin medical student, that she was nominated for election to the East German parliament ("Volkskammer") as one of the 40 candidates representing the youth wing (FDJ) of the party (SED), listed at this stage as "Käte Dienstbach". Under the single list voting system that operated in East Germany, nomination to the candidates list meant nomination to the Volkskammer. Still aged only 23 in 1967, Käte Dienstbach continued to be the youngest member of the parliament until the next election. Between 1967 and 1976 she was a member of the parliamentary committee for people's education. In 1976 she became a member of the parliamentary health committee. As a committee member she found herself at odds with the minister, a man with strong views of his own who failed to value Käte Sima's opinions. In the parliament she voted in favour of the hotly contested 1972 abortion law. Her position on the issue, as a doctor, was increasingly opposed to abortion, having had first-hand experience through her work of the adverse health consequences to which it can lead. But as a woman she continued to believe that it must be for the individual woman to choose whether or not to bring a child into the world: legislators should not purport to second-guess that decision.