32 Facts About Elfriede Paul

Elfriede Paul was a German physician and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime.

Elfriede Paul was one of the few members of the Red Orchestra Group to survive imprisonment at the hands of the Gestapo.

Elfriede Paul came from a petite bourgeoisie family background and was the daughter of a lithographer.

Elfriede Paul attended the monastery of St Johannis in Hamburg and completed the First State Examination of teachers in 1921.

In 1919, Elfriede Paul joined the Free German Youth and, unsatisfied with the organization, joined the German Monist League.

Elfriede Paul found that the Communist Party had the emotional intellect that she had been looking for.

Between 1934 and 1936, Elfriede Paul completed two years of general postgraduate medical training and then obtained a position at the Institute of Hygiene at the Humboldt University of Berlin to study.

In July 1933, Elfriede Paul received a tip that her house was going to be searched for banned literature.

Elfriede Paul left a copy of the Volkischer Beobachter on her desk to assuage their suspicions.

Between 1934 and 1937, Elfriede Paul worked part time in the Municipal Office of Greater Berlin as a school doctor for infants.

From 1936 to 1939, Elfriede Paul worked as a doctor for the League of German Girls, a Nazi organization.

In 1936, Elfriede Paul settled to become a general practitioner in Wilmersdorf.

From 1936 to 1942, Elfriede Paul continued her general practitioner career.

Kuchenmeister, Schumacher, and a Mr Schwarz were selected to visit Elfriede Paul's surgery waiting room.

The conversation did not proceed in the waiting room, so Schwarz ordered Schumacher to introduce himself but Elfriede Paul feared arrest and remained on guard and it was only slowly that her confidence was restored.

Elfriede Paul was right to be wary as Kuchenmeister had already been arrested twice by 1936, once in 1933 and once in 1934, including a nine-month jail sentence spent in Sonnenburg concentration camp, where he was infected with tuberculosis.

Kuchenmeister and Elfriede Paul had become good friends and, in March 1937, Kuchenmeister abandoned his wife and moved in with Elfriede Paul, who took up the education of Kuchenmeister's two sons.

Elfriede Paul would drive around, under the guise of making house calls, and mail carefully disguised anonymous leaflets from distant post boxes.

Elfriede Paul had obtained a guarantee of a cure for Kuchenmeister and hoped he would recover completely.

Elfriede Paul wrote to Kuchenmeister five times over the seven months.

Elfriede Paul was sentenced by the 2nd Senate of the Reichskriegsgericht on 6 February 1943 to six years in prison for "preparation for high treason".

Elfriede Paul was sentenced to death by the 2nd Senate of the Imperial War Court for belonging to the resistance organization, the Red Orchestra, and was executed on 13 May 1943 in Plotzensee Prison in Berlin.

Elfriede Paul was sent to Moringen concentration camp, and in March 1945 was sent to strafbataillon, a penal battalion, and survived the war.

Elfriede Paul found 300 women patients in a hall in the hospital.

Elfriede Paul started back to work as a physician but found it difficult to visit her patients in the American occupation zone and Soviet occupation zone, so she decided to go live with her sister Elsbeth in Burgdorf, Hanover.

In 1945, Elfriede Paul opened a practice and, with some help, she treated patients from Camp Ohio, a large resettlement camp close to Burgdorf that contained hundreds of women, children and old people.

In 1946, Elfriede Paul became a Minister for Construction, Labour and Welfare of the State of Hanover as a member of the Landtag of the Communist Party of Germany.

In 1950, Elfriede Paul returned to work at the Hygienic Institute of the University of Berlin, where she had been an assistant before the war.

Elfriede Paul remained in the position until 1954 when she was appointed as Head of the Occupational Health Inspectorate of the Health Department of the Berlin City Council.

In 1956, Elfriede Paul was appointed to the Chair of Social Hygiene at the Institute of Social Hygiene at the Medical Academy Magdeburg, the University of Magdeburg, which is called the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg.

In 1957, Elfriede Paul undertook a lectureship in occupational medicine at the Medical Academy Magdeburg.

Elfriede Paul received the majority of the honours in the 1960s and 1970s.