Elfriede Paul

Elfriede Paul (14 January 1900 – 30 August 1981) was a German physician and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. Paul, a small and energetic woman, was a communist member of the anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Paul was one of the few members of the Red Orchestra Group to survive imprisonment at the hands of the Gestapo. After the war, she was responsible for drafting health policies for the German Democratic Republic.

Life Elfriede Paul came from a petite bourgeoisie family background and was the daughter of a lithographer. Between 1905 and 1915, she attended middle school in Görlitz and later Harburg. A visit to her father in the infirmary, who had been wounded during the war, and the lack of food during the last years of World War I, led her to contemplate the meaning of war.

Planning to be a fine artist while at school, she was inspired by the anthroposophical ideas of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, but determined that she was unlikely to be successful, and would prefer to be an ordinary teacher rather than a mediocre artist.

After attending the lyceum in Harburg for a year, Paul started a teacher training course in 1917. She attended the monastery of St. Johannis in Hamburg and completed the First State Examination of teachers in 1921. Due to urging from her childhood sweetheart, she became a communist and joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1921. Paul found that the Communist Party had the emotional intellect that she had been looking for. The Sturmabteilung officers arrived at 06:30, but found nothing. Paul left a copy of the Volkischer Beobachter on her desk to assuage their suspicions. In 1936, Paul settled to become a general practitioner in Wilmersdorf. Küchenmeister, Schumacher, and a Mr. Schwarz were selected to visit Paul's surgery waiting room. The conversation did not proceed in the waiting room, so Schwarz ordered Schumacher to introduce himself but Paul feared arrest and remained on guard and it was only slowly that her confidence was restored. Paul stated the following:

I think I should represent you, sir, and now you are appearing here yourself? The visitor, obviously amazed, does not seem to comprehend the situation. Why is he so embarrassed? His attitude is strangely uncertain anyway, as if he were bowed over, as if he had stomach pains. In 1936, Küchenmeister, by now an invalid, was receiving medical treatment for his tuberculosis from Paul. Küchenmeister and Paul had become good friends and, in March 1937, Küchenmeister abandoned his wife and moved in with Paul, who took up the education of Küchenmeister's two sons.

Beginning in 1937, the group began copying and disseminating leaflets and pamphlets from the waiting room of Paul's surgery in Wilmersdorf, using information about the Spanish Civil War received from Harro Schulze-Boysen. The group would target friends and acquaintances to try and make them aware of the "animalistic behaviour" of the Fascists. Küchenmeister stayed in Switzerland for seven months, receiving treatment at the sanatorium in Leysin. Paul wrote to Küchenmeister five times over the seven months. Over the next several years, Paul was intimately involved in the group.

Arrest On 16 September 1942, two Gestapo agents arrived at 6:30 in the morning. Küchenmeister knew what the arrival of the agents meant, and instructed Paul to switch off the fridge and to "come along". Due to the Nazi concept that the family shares responsibility for a crime, known as Sippenhaft, Küchenmeister's son Rainer was also jailed. He was sent to Moringen concentration camp, and in March 1945 was sent to strafbataillon, a penal battalion, and survived the war.

In February 1945, Paul, along with 300 other women, was transported in a cattle car to Leipzig. While imprisoned, she was allowed to volunteer in the prison hospital. She found 300 women patients in a hall in the hospital.

During this period she worked for the reformation of the KPD in Hanover and the surrounding districts, as old colleagues returned from the concentration camps and prisons. After a two-week holiday in Burgdorf, she decided to settle there, when the KPD asked for her help, as they had insufficient staff in the Hanover officer and the Berlin KPD office was well staffed.

In 1946, 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. The position only lasted for a year as Hanover was in the British Zone of Occupation and became part of Lower Saxony in 1946 and Paul's position as a member of the assembly was dissolved. the University of Magdeburg, which is now called the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg.

Paul received the majority of the honours in the 1960s and 1970s. In Templin, the children's home, Elfriede Paul of Lebenshilfe, was named after her. On 13 October 2010, a Stolperstein, or stumbling block, was laid in front of their last house before the Gestapo arrested them in the Saxon Palace, located at 63a Sächsische Strasse in Wilmersdorf.

Odonymy In Hanover, Paul has a street after her, called Elfriede Paul Alley (Elfriede-Paul-Allee).