Hilde Ephraim

Hilde Ephraim (1 April 1905 – 20 September 1940) was a German welfare worker who became a resistance activist during the Nazi years. She was murdered because of her involvement in the Socialist Workers' Party ("Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands" / SAP) and in the Red Aid ("Rote Hilfe") workers' welfare operation.

Life Hilde Ephraim was born in Berlin. By 1931 she was working in Brandenburg an der Havel as a state employed social-care worker. That was the year in which she joined the Socialist Workers' Party ("Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands" / SAPD), a newly formed breakaway party composed chiefly of former Social Democratic Party members, keen to promote closer collaboration between moderate socialists and German Communists in order to try and prevent the coming to power of a right wing populist party. Within the SAPD she almost immediately emerged as a leader of the local Brandenburg branch. The idea of preventing Nazi success by uniting the political left failed, however: in January 1933 the Nazi Party took power and lost no time in transforming the country into a one-party dictatorship, which meant among other things that political activity - other than on behalf of the Nazi Party - became illegal. Because of her Jewish provenance and her record of political activism, Ephraim lost her job. She now relocated from Brandenburg back to Berlin where she joined the underground struggle against Nazism. Surviving files show that in order to conceal the precise circumstances of her death, her family were wrongly informed that she had died in far away Chelm. Because of this, some subsequent sources, relying on official documents from the Nazi period, still give the place of her death as Chelm.