Elfriede Paul


Elfriede Paul was a German physician. Paul, a small and energetic women, was most notable for being a communist member of the anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Gestapo. Paul was one of the few members of the Red Orchestra Group to survive imprisonment or execution at the hands of the Gestapo. After the war she became an important person in drawing up health policy for the peoples of the German Democratic Republic.

Life

Paul came from a petite bourgeoisie family background and was the daughter of a lithographer. Between 1905 and 1915 Paul attended a middle school both in Görlitz and later Harburg. After a visit to her father in the infirmary who had been wounded during the war and the lack of food, having little to eat during the last years of World War I, started her thinking about the meaning of war. Planning to be a fine artist while at school, she was informed by the anthroposophical ideas of the Austrian philosopherRudolf Steiner but after reading the book took a rational view that she was unlikely to be successful, rather be an ordinary teacher than a mediocre artist.
After attending the lyceum in Harburg for a year, she started a teacher training course in 1917 attending the monastery of St. Johannis in Hamburg and achieving the first state examination for the teaching profession in 1921. In 1919 Paul joined the Free German Youth and unsatisfied with the organisation, joins the German Monist League and from urging from her childhood sweetheart she becomes a communist and joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1921. Paul found that the communist party has the emotional intellect that she has been looking for, for a long time.
While working as a teacher in Hamburg, she started a medical degree in 1926. During the year between 1930 and 1931 Paul worked in Vienna and later passing the Staatsexamen in Berlin and completing the degree in 1933. Between 1934 and 1936 Paul completed two years of general postgraduate medical training and then obtained a position at the Institute of Hygiene at the Humboldt University of Berlin to study. In 1936 she was promoted to D.Phil with a thesis titled, Die Beeinflussung der Menstruation durch das Landjahr. In 1954 she completed her habilitation with a thesis titled, Ursachen und Dauer der Arbeitsunfähigkeit bei der Frau.

Career

In July 1933 Paul had a tip that her house was going to be searched. The Sturmabteilung duely arrived at 06.30hours, searched the apartment but find no banned literature. Paul left a copy of the Volkischer Beobachter on her desk to assuage their suspicions.
In 1934 Paul received her licence to be a doctor. Between 1934 and 1937 Paul worked in the Municipal Office of Greater Berlin as an school doctor for infants, which was a part-time role. At the same time she worked in an unpaid role as an assistant in the Hygiene Institute of the University of Berlin.
From 1936 to 1939 Paul worked as a doctor for the League of German Girls, a Nazi organisation. In 1936 Paul had settled to become a general practitioner at 63a Sächsischen Straße in Wilmersdorf. On the same floor as her practice lived Reich Culture Minister Hans Hinkel. From 1936 to 1942 Paul worked at her increasingly busy practice.

Red Orchestra

At the end of 1936, Libertas Schulze-Boysen and Walter Küchenmeister, on the advice of Elisabeth Schumacher, sought out the doctor. Küchenmeister and Schumacher and a Mr Schwarz were elected to visit Paul's surgery waiting room. The conversation doesn't proceed in the waiting room, so Schwarz ordered Schumacher to introduce himself but Paul fears arrest, remains on guard and it is only slowly that her confidence is restored. Paul stated the following was stated:
Paul was right to be wary as Küchenmeister had already been arrested twice by 1936, once in 1933 and once in a 1934, including a 9-month jail sentence spent in Sonnenburg concentration camp where he was infected with tuberculosis. In 1936 Küchenmeister, by now an invalid was receiving medical treatment for his tuberculosis from Paul. Küchenmeister and Paul had become good friends and subsequently in March 1937 Küchenmeister abandoned his wife and moved in with Paul who would intensively take-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 behavior of the Fascists. Secrecy was essential and even getting paper and stamps was becoming more difficult. Paul would drive around, under the guise of making house calls and mail carefully disguised anonymous leaflets from distant post boxes.
In April 1939 Küchenmeister's tuberculosis has advanced so much that Paul advised him to attend a sanatorium, recommending alpine air. Paul had obtained a guarantee of a cure for Küchenmeister and hoped he would recover completely. Both Küchenmeister, Paul and the Schumacher's travelled to Leysin in Switzerland, finding the trip to be less suffocating than the Berlin under Nazi rule.Küchenmeister stayed in Switzerland for seven months receiving treatment at the sanatorium in Leysin. Elfriede Paul wrote to Kuchenmeister five times over the seven months. Over the next several years, Paul was intimately involved in the group.

Arrest

On the 16 September 1942 two Gestapo agents arrived at 6.30 hours in the morning. Küchenmeister knew what the arrival of the agents meant, instructed Paul to switch off the fridge and instructed her to come along. Paul, Küchenmeister and his son Rainer were arrested. Both Paul and Rainer were taken to a holding cell on Alexanderplatz. Paul was sentenced by the 2nd senate of the Reichskriegsgericht on 6 February 1943 to six years in prison for preparation for high treason.
Walter Küchenmeister was taken to Dachau concentration camp. He was sentenced to death by the 2nd Senate of the Imperial War Court for belonging to the resistance organisation, the Red Orchestra, and was executed on 13 May 1943 in Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. Due to the German idea that the family shares responsibility for a crime, known as Sippenhaft, Küchenmeister son Rainer felt the brunt as he was 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 cattle cars to Leipzig. While imprisoned she was allowed to volunteer in the prison hospital. She found 300 women patients in a hall in the hospital. The women had every disease imaginable with the place full of vermin. While working as a doctor there she contracted Tuberculosis in her left lung. Due to the bombing it was impossible to bury the dead, so she stacked the dead bodies in a shed on the hospital grounds.

After World War 2

On 7 May 1945 Paul and the rest of the prisoners were released when an American tank from the US 2nd Infantry Division drove through the garden wall. The tank crew released all the prisoners and gave what rations they could. After recovering, Paul returned to Berlin, an unrecognisable city now bombed to destruction. Paul started back to work as a physician but found it difficult to visit her patients in the American occupation zone and Soviet occupation zone, so she decided to go live with her sister Elsbeth in Burgdorf, Hanover
During this period she worked for the reformation of the KPD in Hannover and the surrounding districts, as old colleagues returned from the concentration camps and prisons. After two weeks holiday in Burgdorf she decided to settle there, when the KPD asked for her help, as they had insufficient staff in the Hannover officer and the Berlin KPD office was well staffed.
In 1945 Paul opened a practice and with some help she treated patients from a Camp Ohio, a large resettlement camp close to Burgdorf that contained hundreds of women, children and old people. Paul stated of the experience:
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 with Paul position as member of the assembly was dissolved. On 1 May 1947, Elfriede returned to Berlin.
For the next two years Paul was director of the Division for Occupational Health Care in the German Economic Commission. The following year she was Medical director of the Insurance Institute Berlin. In 1950 Paul returned to work at the Hygienic Institute of the University of Berlin, where she had been an assistant before the war. Paul remained in the position until 1954 when she was appointed to as Head of the Occupational Health Inspectorate of the Health Department of the Berlin City Council. In 1956 Paul was appointed to the Chair of Social Hygiene at the Institute of Social Hygiene at the Medical Academy Magdeburg the University of Magdeburg, that is now called the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg.
In 1957 Paul also undertook a lectureship in occupational medicine at the Medical Academy Magdeburg. As a social hygienist she included clinicians from various fields in the lecture series occupational hygiene. From 1960 she was also city councillor in Magdeburg. She retired in 1964.

Awards and honours

Paul received the majority of the honours in the 1960's and 1970's.
This is a representative list of medical articles and books written or co-written by Paul.
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