Katherine Oppenheimer

Katherine Vissering "Kitty" Oppenheimer ( Puening; August 8, 1910 – October 27, 1972) was a German American biologist, botanist, and a member of the Communist Party of America.

Her husbands were Frank Ramseyer, Joe Dallet, Richard Stewart Harrison, and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.

Katherine Vissering "Kitty" Puening was born in Recklinghausen, Westphalia, Prussia, Germany, on August 8, 1910, the only child of Franz Puening and Käthe Vissering.

Although she claimed that her father was a prince and that her mother was related to Queen Victoria, these claims were untrue.

Puening arrived in the United States on May 14, 1913, aboard the SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse.

Her father, a metallurgical engineer, had invented a new kind of blast furnace, and had gained employment with a steel company in Pittsburgh, and the family settled in the suburb of Aspinwall, Pennsylvania.

Although her first language was German, she soon became fluent in English, speaking both languages without accent.

Her parents regularly took her with them on summer visits to Germany.

At a New Year's Eve party later that year, Puening met Joseph Dallet Jr. After the 1927 executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, he joined the Communist Party of America in 1929.

After graduating from Aspinwall High School in June 1928, Puening enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh.

She lived at home and attended freshman classes in mathematics, biology and chemistry.

Her father now worked for Koppers, and held patents for the design of blast furnaces.

Puening convinced her parents that it would be a good idea for her to study in Germany, and she sailed for Europe in March 1930.

It is doubtful that she took any classes, but she did meet Frank Ramseyer, an American studying music in Paris under Nadia Boulanger, before sailing for home on May 19.

He had been involved in the International Unemployment Day protest in Chicago on March 6, 1930, that was brutally repressed by the authorities, and worked as a union organizer with the steel workers in Youngstown, Ohio.

At one point Dallet unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Youngstown on the Communist Party ticket.

Puening's parents had moved to Claygate, southwest of London, where her father represented a Chicago-based firm.

Puening completed the first year of her degree, and married Ramseyer before a Justice of the Peace in Pittsburgh on December 24, 1932.

The couple moved to an apartment near Harvard University, where Ramseyer hoped to pursue a master's degree in music.

She re-enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh in January 1933, and returned to her parents' home in Aspinwall.

In June 1933, she sailed to Europe again with her husband.

After returning, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, although there is no record of her completing any courses there.

Puening obtained an annulment of her marriage from the Superior Court of Wisconsin on December 20, 1933.

She later told friends that she had discovered evidence that Ramseyer was a homosexual and a drug addict.

Puening also had an abortion.

On returning to the United States on August 3, 1934, after visiting family in Europe, she moved in with Dallet, becoming his common-law wife.

They shared a room in a dilapidated boarding house that cost $5 per month.

Gus Hall and John Gates had a room down the hall.

They lived on the dole, $12.50 per month each.

As the wife of a party member, Puening was allowed to join the Communist Party, but only after proving her loyalty by distributing copies of the Daily Worker on the streets.

Her party dues were 10c a week.

They separated in June 1936, and Puening went to live with her parents in Claygate, where she worked as a German-to-English translator.

Months went by without any word from Dallet, until Puening discovered that her mother had been hiding his letters to her.

"Her mother," her friend Anne Wilson recalled, "was a real dragon, a very repressive woman. She disappeared one day over the side of a transatlantic ship, and nobody missed her. That says it all."

The last letter from Dallet said that he was heading to Spain on the RMS Queen Mary to join the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

Puening met up with Dallet and his best friend Steve Nelson in Cherbourg, and they travelled to Paris together.

After a few days there, she returned to London, and they headed south, crossing into Spain where he joined the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, a unit composed of American and Canadian volunteers.

Puening wanted to join Dallet in Spain, and finally secured permission to do so.

Her trip to Spain was delayed by hospitalization for an operation on August 26, 1937, for what was initially thought to be appendicitis, but which was determined to be ovarian cysts, which were removed by the German doctors.

Her mother was, in fact, a cousin of Wilhelm Keitel, who later became a field marshal in the German Army during World War II, and was hanged in 1946.