Dora Schaul

Dora Schaul (born Dora Davidsohn, 21 September 1913 – 8 August 1999) was a German woman noted particularly for her undercover work at official offices in German-occupied France during World War II. She passed on significant information to the French Resistance. Her experiences and those of numerous other German opponents of the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany were described in her 1973 book Résistance – Erinnerungen deutscher Antifaschisten (Résistance — Memories of German Antifascists). She has been honored in France by the naming of a street in Brens, Tarn, and in Germany by a plaque near her long-time residence in Berlin. She attended a commercially oriented secondary school ("Handelsschule") and then took a job as a sales representative in Berlin.

Exile In January 1933, a few months after her nineteenth birthday, national politics intervened in her life with the change of government. Antisemitism became mainstream, and in order to obtain work Dora Davidsohn emigrated to Amsterdam in the Netherlands. By the end of 1934 she had met Alfred Benjamin, another German Jewish exile and a man who, as a member of the German Communist Party

War and capture Early in September 1939 France declared war on Germany, two days after the German army had launched an invasion of Poland. Dora Davidsohn (still living with Alfred Benjamin, but not yet married to him) still had no work permit, but she responded to the outbreak of war by reporting to the local prefecture in order to regularise her residency status. After some rapid bureaucratic dithering, the authorities responded by arresting her as an enemy alien, and she was imprisoned at La petite Roquette. On 18 October 1939, joining a large number of others identified as enemy aliens, she was moved to Rieucros Women's Internment Camp at Mende in central southern France. Alfred Benjamin and Dora Davidsohn married.

Resistance On 14 July 1942, while others celebrated Bastille Day, Dora Benjamin escaped from the internment camp at Brens.

Like her husband, Dora Benjamin headed east after escaping, ending up in Lyon, where she joined the Resistance. For the next few years Dora Schaul worked as a research assistant at the Marxist Leninist Institute which had been established by the recently formed ruling SED (party) of the German Democratic Republic, the Soviet sponsored stand-alone German state itself founded in October 1949 out of what had till then been the Soviet occupation zone.

In 1973 Dora Schaul published Résistance – Erinnerungen deutscher Antifaschisten (Memories of German Antifascists), in order to ensure that the lessons from the Nazi years should never be forgotten.

Honours

On 12 March 2006, a street in Brens was renamed.