THE headstones of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Ernst Thalmann and other revolutionary martyrs have been vandalised in a shocking desecration at the Friedrichsfelde Cemetery in Berlin.

The metal plaques carrying the names and dates of birth and death of the leading communists buried around the Memorial to the Socialists have been taken in an attack reported to German police on Monday.

The tombs surround a giant gravestone bearing the inscription The Dead Remind Us, and form part of an enclosed park within the cemetery whose walls bear the names of hundreds of other revolutionaries killed in the struggle, from those slain fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War to victims of Nazi terror in Germany itself.