Antonie "Toni" Pfülf (14 December 1877 – 8 June 1933) was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). An advocate of equal rights for women, she was a member of the Reichstag from 1920 to 1933 and one of the most prominent women in her party. After the Nazi rise to power, she voted against the Enabling Act of 1933. Refusing to admit defeat and flee the country, she committed suicide in June.
Herta Gotthelf (6 June 1902 – 13 May 1963) was a German journalist and politician (SPD).Before 1933 she was editor in chief of the SPD women's magazine Genossin. After 1945 she worked in the Schumacher Office, set up in 1945 by Kurt Ernst Carl Schumacher to recreate the party. Within the party executive, between 1946 and 1956, she can be described as "the main voice of SPD women's policies ... as the women's officer (Frauenbeauftragte)".
Ella Kay (16 December 1895 – 3 February 1988) was a Berlin city politician (SPD) with a particular interest in workers' welfare and youth matters. During the Hitler years she became a resistance activist: she focused on looking after victims of government persecution. Despite being subject to surveillance and frequent visits from the security services, she avoided arrest.After 1945 she found herself in the Soviet occupation zone where, during 1946, she was elected mayor of the district of Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. She was removed from office in December 1947 by the military administrators. After 1948 the differences implicit in the administrative division of Berlin into four separately controlled military occupation zones began to find increasingly intrusive resonances in administrative and physical differences, especially as between the eastern part of the city, controlled by the Soviets, and the three other sectors of the city, which by this time were coming to be known collectively as West Berlin. In or before 1949 Ella Kay relocated to West Berlin, where, between 1955 and 1962, she served as Senator for Youth and Sport.
Bernard Johann Heinrich Koenen (17 February 1889 – 30 April 1964) was a German politician.Between 1953 and 1958 he was the East German ambassador to Czechoslovakia.
Hilde Neumann (born Hilde Martha Betty Rosenfeld: 13 April 1905, in Berlin-Karlshorst – 11 September 1959, in Berlin) was a German lawyer.She was politically leftwing and of Jewish provenance: she spent the Nazi years in exile. In 1947 she returned to Berlin and resumed her political focus, becoming a senior legal official in the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands / SED), which by 1949 had become the ruling party of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) which was formally established in October of that year. She also served as editor in chief of "Neue Justiz", an East German monthly specialist journal concerned with legal matters.
Walter Arthur Berendsohn (10 September 1884, in Hamburg – 30 January 1984, in Stockholm) was a German literary scholar. He was an active member of the Deutsche Liga fur Menschenrechte (League for Men's Rights), a spinoff of the pacifist Bund Neues Vaterland, until 1933 when he fled for Sweden when the group was dissolved by Nazis.
Hertha Sturm (born Edith Fischer, 24 July 1886: died while in state custody before or during 1945) was a German political activist (SPD, KPD) who after 1933 became a resistance activist. She spent most of the twelve Nazi years in state detention, during which time she was badly tortured and made at least one suicide attempt. She did not outlive the Nazi regime.Hertha Sturm is the name by which she is identified in most sources referring to her political actions and to her experiences under the Nazis. It was the name she took on for her Communist Party work in January 1920 and retained thereafter. In addition to her birth name, Edith Fischer, she may also be identified after 1912, by her married name, as Edith Schumann.
Richard Aßmann (16 December 1875 – 21 June 1933) became a Works Council Chairman ("Betriebsratsvorsitzender") with the AOK (national Health Insurance provider) in Berlin. He also involved himself in politics and was a member of the centre-left Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD).On 20 June 1933 he was forcibly removed from a tram by Nazi paramilitaries and taken away. His body was found, badly degraded, in a sack in the Dahme (river) on 11 July 1933. His daughter, Hilde Aßmann, was required to identify the body, which she was able to do because she recognised his wrist watch. Although the precise date of his death was never established, Richard Aßmann is generally seen as the first of an estimated 500 victims – at least 23 of whom were murdered while in detention and subsequently identified – of Köpenick's week of bloodshed ("die Köpenicker Blutwoche"), one of the first recorded mass-atrocities carried out by the Nazis after they took power in January 1933.
Richard Müller (9 December 1880 – 11 May 1943) was a German socialist, metal worker, union shop steward, and later historian. Trained as a lathe-operator, Müller later became an industrial unionist and organizer of mass-strikes against World War I. In 1918 he was a leading figure of the council movement in the German Revolution. In the 1920s he wrote a three-volume history of the German Revolution.
Ernst Torgler (25 April 1893 – 19 January 1963) was the last chairman of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) faction in the German Reichstag before he worked for the Nazis.