Paul Franken

Paul Franken (27 June 1894 – Autumn 1944) was a German socialist newspaper editor and politician who served in the Landtag of Prussia from 1921 to 1925 and again from 1928 to 1933, during which he represented four separate socialist parties. He was detained for the next seven years and is believed to have died in a labour camp near Vorkuta during the autumn of 1944.

Life Paul Franken was born in Höhscheid (Solingen), some 40 km (25 miles) east of Düsseldorf in the heavily industrialised Ruhr region of Germany. His father was a foundry worker. Franken attended school locally and in 1908 started training as a specialist metal worker (Former & Nadler). It was probably around this time, in 1920, that he married the fellow left-wing activist, Flora Goldberg (1899–1991). In the meantime, in 1922 he switched his party affiliation back to the SPD. Flora Franken, who was both Jewish and a Socialist, had even more reason to fear the Nazis than her husband, and emigrated to Riga, joining her mother in Latvia.

Flora Franken, who had accompanied her husband to the Soviet Union in 1934, was permitted to return to the German Democratic Republic with her son, Peter, in May 1955. She took a job with Dietz Verlag (the Berlin publishing house), later switching to the (closely associated) Marxism–Leninism Institute of East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party (Central Committee).