Martha Ruben-Wolf

Martha Ruben-Wolf (17 June 1887 – 16 August 1939) was a German physician and author who became a political activist (KPD) after World War I.

After the Nazi take-over in January 1933 she emigrated with her family, ending up living permanently in the Soviet Union. A series of disappointments followed and she became increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system which earlier, when she had written about the Soviet Union as a visitor from the west, she had eulogised. Her husband was identified as a Gestapo spy and executed in 1938. On 16 August 1939 Martha Ruben-Wolf was still unaware of what had happened to her husband following his arrest on 27 November 1937 when, despairing, she committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.

Life Martha Ruben was born in Löhne, a small manufacturing town to the north of Paderborn. Moritz "Max" Ruben, her father, is described as a small businessman of Jewish provenance. Her upbringing was not a religious one, however. According to one estimate , by 1931 more than 150,000 copies had been printed.

She stood for election to the regional parliament ("Preußischer Landtag") in 1928 and to the national parliament ("Reichstag") in 1930 and again in March 1933, but without being elected. (Sources differ.) Accused of being a Gestapo spy, on 4 October 1938 he was sentenced to death and shot. (Again, sources differ as to the date.) By this time she had been able to return to the medical profession, first as a nurse and then as a doctor. The cause of her death is given as an overdose of sleeping pills.

Her children were deported to Karaganda in Kazakhstan in 1941. Sonja married Israel Friedmann, a Zionist from Lithuania, in 1942. In 1944 she gave birth to the couple's daughter and in 1948 they were permitted to move to Vilnius. Lithuania had been part of the Soviet Union since 1940, and it was only in 1958 that Sonja was permitted, with her family, to leave the Soviet Union. They were released to East Germany but were able to relocate to West Germany from where, still in 1958, they emigrated to Israel. Martha's younger child, Walter was conscripted into the Red Army and killed in action in 1943.