The Communist icon's corpse was buried in a tomb in Berlin where every year thousands of sympathisers have honoured her fight for a workers' paradise.

Or so everyone thought.

It turns out that a previously unidentified body that was found two years ago in a wooden coffin in a basement room at Berlin's Charite hospital, could be Luxemburg, according to the head of the institution's forensic medicine department.

Michael Tsokos says that the body, which is without arms, legs and head, bears "astonishing similarities" to Luxemburg, indicating that her last resting place was not, in fact, in a grave at a cemetery in the German capital that was later vandalised by the Nazis.

But his claims are fiercely disputed, and have generated an intense debate in Germany around the fate of a woman still widely respected across the political spectrum.