Born in Tsarist Poland in 1871, Rosa Luxemburg was a member of an illegal socialist organization by the time she was 16. She was active in the Polish underground and had to be smuggled to Zurich after a wave of strikes. She later moved to Germany, to be at the centre of international socialism, and became a prominent political leader. She was imprisoned for her outspoken opposition to the World War I and later led thousands of workers in the German uprising of 1918. A few months later she was brutally murdered, beaten to death by soldiers acting on government orders.