Ella Ehlers

The Barkenhoff was a large detached house that had been acquired by the artist-turned-pacifist Heinrich Vogeler in 1894, and which after the First World War was made available by its owner to "Red Aid", a communist led workers' welfare organisation with well-publicised links to its Moscow based sister organisation ("Междунаро́дная организа́ция по́мощи борца́м револю́ции" / МОПР).

Both her parents were active trades unionists and, by 1900, members of the still far from mainstream Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD).

Politics and socialism were frequently discussed within the family, often with great passion.

At the age of eight Ella would join her brother to deliver the pro-SPD Leipziger Volkszeitung (Newspaper), in order to be able to contribute to the family housekeeping budget.

Ella Ehlers (born Ella Schimpf: 30 May 1904 – 9 April 1985) was a German Kindergarten teacher.

In 1914, when she was ten both her parents resigned from the SPD, horrified by the decision of the party leadership in the Reichstag (national parliament) to vote in favour of war credits to help finance the war which had broken out in July.

That decision was contentious with many party members; and by the time the war ended four years later had led to a party split and thereby, indirectly, the launch of the Communist Party of Germany During December/January 1918/1919.

1918 was the year in which she left school and went to work in the children's ward at a nearby hospital and, later, at as a domestic assistant at a sanatorium.

When she had been younger she had planned to become a teacher, and now she was keen to train and qualify for a career in nursing, but both options were closed off to her by the absence of the necessary funds in the family.

Red Aid reconfigured the house for use as a rehabilitation home for the children of killed Communist activists and those who had been arrested and detained in the aftermath of the uprisings in the ports and industrial cities during 1918/19.

Other sources emphasize the extent to which many of the children looked after in The Barkenhoff were "half-orphans" (the children of war-widow mothers) and children from families in which the fathers had been too badly wounded in the war to be able to find work and provide for their own children.

According to at least one source the Barkenhoff children's home was organised on a "collective" basis.

Her parents joined the Communist Party in 1920.

Ella and her siblings joined the Young Communists.

In 1922 a "free place" came up for a traineeship as a Kindergarten teacher and registered children's nurse: she grabbed her opportunity.

Following qualification, Schimpf worked between 1924 and 1928 at the Barkenhoff in Worpswede, a small town set in the flat marshlands to the north of Bremen that had become home to a lively artistic community since the end of the 19th century.

Ever since Ernst Thälmann had become party leader in 1925 there had been a drive from the top for the Communist Party of Germany to align itself more closely - and some thought ever more unquestioningly - with the uncompromising anti-Trotskyite "hardline" version of communism which by this time was being propounded and implemented by the Soviet party under Stalin.

Through her work, in 1926 she met Adolf Ehlers (1898–1978), a political activist who at around the same time was readmitted to the Communist Party.

Elsewhere it is stated that Ella Schimpf/Ehlers was placed in overall charge of it in 1926 and ran it for the next two years.

It was through the highly politicised children's home at which she worked that in 1926 Ella Schimpf met Adolf Ehlers (1898–1978).

Ehlers was a prominent member of the Communist Party and the newly appointed secretary of "Red Aid".

The two of them quickly formed an intense personal relationship which, as matters turned out, would become life-long.

She became his secretary and then, in 1928, his wife.

Ella Schimpf had grown up in a heavily politicised family, and she now participated energetically with her husband in the increasingly polarised politics of the time.

Nevertheless, her extensive hands-on experience of childcare would later prove invaluable for her subsequent career in the care sector and, after 1928, in politics.

They married at some point between 1928 and 1935: sources differ.

The marriage would remain childless.

By the time the Ehlers relocated to Berlin in 1928 they were both committed members of the Communist Party which was itself in a state of intensifying inner turmoil.

In 1929 Ella Ehlers took over the direction of a MOPR ("International Red Aid") children's home in Elgersburg, in the countryside south of Erfurt in Thuringia, from where every two months she visited her husband who had remained in Berlin.

Over the next couple of years she became caught up in the backwash from the ferocious party ructions of the period, both on account of her husband and on her own account.

After 1933 she engaged in dangerous (and illegal) anti-government resistance, but she nevertheless survived the twelve Hitler years.

One result of this in Germany was an unbending hostility to the centre-left Social Democratic Party, which contributed to a division on the political left of German politics that would prove disastrous in the build-up to 1933.

Adolf and Ella Ehlers had relocated to Berlin, and Adolf Ehlers had remained there, in order that he might undertake an important job as national head of the propaganda department for "Red Aid".

In 1945 she rejoined the (no longer illegal) Communist Party, but switched the next year to the SPD and built a new political career in Bremen, at times working closely with her husband who became a senator and later, between 1959 and 1963, mayor of the city.

Her own focus was mostly on the social and welfare sectors.

She was involved in the setting up of several new support organisations.

Ella Ehlers' final major role came in 1964 when she was appointed to chair the state committee of the Workers' Welfare organisation.

Ella Schimpf was born in Dresden, the youngest of her parents' three children.

Karl Schimpf, father worked as a glazier and cabinet maker.

Her mother Maria had worked in one of Dresden's many cigarette factories, but after the births of the children switched to making hand-rolled cigarettes as a "home worker".