Elfriede Paul

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Stumbling stone in front of the house at Sächsische Strasse 63a in Berlin-Wilmersdorf

Elfriede Paul (born January 14, 1900 in Cologne , † August 30, 1981 in Ahrenshoop ) was a German doctor, health politician and resistance fighter in the Red Chapel .

Life

Elfriede Paul was the daughter of a lithographer. After secondary school, she attended the Lyceum in Hamburg-Harburg in 1915/1916 and then the St. Johannis convent school , where she attended the teachers' seminar. In 1920 she passed her school leaving examination and in 1921 she was finally qualified to teach in higher schools. Through her father she discovered the desire to hike and joined a youth organization close to the SPD . Through her childhood love she came to the KPD , which she officially joined in 1921. From 1921 to 1924 she worked as a teacher and then as director of a children's home (orphanage) in Hamburg . In 1926 she began studying medicine in Berlin and Vienna . She had to make a living by doing odd jobs. In 1932/33 she worked for the journals Sanatorium and Health and Education . In 1933 she passed the medical state examination in Berlin and then completed the practical year in the radiation institute of the Friedrich Wilhelms University . She received her license to practice medicine in 1934, after which she worked as an unpaid volunteer assistant in the University's Hygiene Institute and at the same time in the “Counseling Center for Hereditary and Racial Care of the City of Berlin”, in infant care in the Mitte district and as a school doctor . In her dissertation from 1936 she dealt with the "Influence of menstruation through the country year " and was awarded a Dr. med. PhD . In 1936 she opened her own practice on Sächsische Strasse in Berlin-Wilmersdorf .

1936 is also the year in which she met and fell in love with Walter Küchenmeister . Through him she got in contact with the resistance groups around Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack . Their practice became a meeting point and news center. Outwardly, she had come to terms with National Socialism through membership in the National Socialist People's Welfare (1933), the Bund Deutscher Mädel (1935) and the National Socialist German Medical Association (1936).

Paul was arrested in autumn 1942 and sentenced by the Reich Court Martial in early 1943 to six years in prison for high treason . After imprisonment in the Berlin-Alexanderplatz prison and the Charlottenburg police prison, she was transported to the Cottbus women's prison in July 1943 and to the Leipzig / Klein-Meusdorf prison in early 1945 .

After the liberation from National Socialism , Paul first opened a practice in Burgdorf near Hanover in August 1945 , where her sister had been able to save the Berlin practice facility. She sat as a representative of the KPD in the local denazification committee . When the State of Hanover was founded in August 1946, she became Minister for Development, Labor and Welfare, including the Health System. At the same time she represented the KPD in the state parliament. Both functions ended in November 1946 when Hanover became part of the newly formed state of Lower Saxony .

In 1947 Paul moved to the Soviet zone of occupation and became head of department for company health care at the German Economic Commission in Berlin. From 1949 to 1950 she was the medical director of the Berlin Insurance Company . She then worked briefly as a company doctor and became an assistant at the Hygiene Institute at the University of Berlin. After social hygiene had become the state examination subject in medical studies in the GDR in 1951 , Paul became the first woman in the GDR to do her habilitation in this subject in 1955 . But she, too, had to find out “that (also) under our social conditions there were still scientists who put obstacles in the way of women,” as she later wrote.

She wrote her habilitation thesis on “Investigations into the causes, frequency and duration of incapacity for work in women” . She was not only the first woman in the subject of social hygiene, but also in the entire teaching staff in Magdeburg at the time .

From 1954 to 1956 she was in charge of the health service department of the Berlin magistrate, for which she had been researching the incapacity of women in the previous two years. On August 1, 1956, she was appointed director of the Institute for Social Hygiene at the Magdeburg Medical Academy. “It was not easy for me,” she wrote in her memoir, “to forego my academic career during the Nazi era. Then the detention interrupted my medical practice, and after the liberation other tasks were in the foreground. "

Elfriede Paul received an additional teaching position for occupational medicine at the Medical Academy Magdeburg (MAM) from 1957. As a social hygienist, she involved clinicians from various fields in the lecture series “Industrial Hygiene”. From 1960 she was also a city councilor in Magdeburg. She retired in 1964.

Selection of works

  • Protection of the health of women in our agriculture . Verlag Volk und Gesundheit, Berlin 1974.
  • A consulting room of the Red Chapel . Berlin 1981.
  • Companion on uneven roads . In: Günther Albrecht, Wolfgang Hartwig (Hrsg.): Doctors - memories, experiences, confessions . Berlin 1988, pp. 93-117.

Awards (selection)

However, it did not receive most of the awards until the 1960s and 1970s.

Honors

literature

  • Elfriede Paul . In: Udo Schagen, Sabine Schleiermacher: 100 years of history of social hygiene, social medicine and public health in Germany. Documentation by the German Society for Social Medicine and Prevention (DGSMP) , CD-Rom, Berlin 2005.
  • Antje Dantzer: Company health care for women as a model of emancipation in the early GDR - the role of social hygienist Elfriede Paul; Dissertation HU Berlin
  • Shareen Blair Brysac: Mildred Harnack and the “Red Chapel”. The story of an unusual woman and a resistance movement. Scherz-Verlag, Bern 2003, ISBN 3-502-18090-3
  • Gert Rosiejka: The Red Chapel. "Treason" as anti-fascist resistance ; Hamburg: Results-Verlag, 1986; ISBN 3-925622-16-0
  • Hans Teubner : Country of Exile Switzerland 1933–1945 . Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 1975.
  • Roman Guski, Johanna Jawinsky, Hannelore Rabe: Memorials for victims and persecuted persons of the Nazi regime in the new cemetery in Rostock (published by the VVN-BdA Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania). Rostock 2011, ISBN 978-300-0350-375 , p. 35.
  • Peter Schneck:  Paul, Elfriede . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Friedrich Winterhager: Testimonials from German-speaking doctors, including corrections and additions. In: Würzburger medical history reports 24, 2005, p. 552 f.
  2. ^ Paul, Elfriede: A consulting room of the Red Orchestra , Berlin 1981, p. 237
  3. ^ Paul, Elfriede: A consulting room of the Red Orchestra , Berlin 1981, p. 243
  4. ↑ Medical Faculty / University Hospital Magdeburg A. ö. R. - History of University Medicine in Magdeburg - Looking back over half a century .
  5. ^ Neues Deutschland , March 7, 1980, p. 2
  6. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from March 30, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Paul, Elfriede
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Chef de cuisine, Elfriede
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German university professor, health politician and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH January 14, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne
DATE OF DEATH August 30, 1981
Place of death Ahrenshoop