Elfriede Paul (14 January 1900 – 30 August 1981) was a German physician and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime.

Paul, a small and energetic woman, was a communist member of the anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr.

Between 1934 and 1936, Paul completed two years of general postgraduate medical training[4] and then obtained a position at the Institute of Hygiene at the Humboldt University of Berlin to study.

[4] Between 1934 and 1937, Paul worked part time in the Municipal Office of Greater Berlin as a school doctor for infants.

[4] At the end of 1936, Libertas Schulze-Boysen and Walter Küchenmeister, on the advice of Elisabeth Schumacher, sought out Paul.

The conversation did not proceed in the waiting room, so Schwarz ordered Schumacher to introduce himself but Paul feared arrest and remained on guard and it was only slowly that her confidence was restored.

[13] 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.

Paul would drive around, under the guise of making house calls, and mail carefully disguised anonymous leaflets from distant post boxes.

[14] In April 1939, Küchenmeister's tuberculosis had advanced so much that Paul advised him to attend a sanatorium, recommending alpine air.

Küchenmeister, Paul, and the Schumachers travelled to Leysin in Switzerland, finding the trip to be less suffocating than Berlin under Nazi rule.

Paul was sentenced by the 2nd Senate of the Reichskriegsgericht on 6 February 1943 to six years in prison for "preparation for high treason".

[11] He was sentenced to death by the 2nd Senate of the Imperial War Court for belonging to the resistance organization, the Red Orchestra, and was executed on 13 May 1943 in Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.

[17] Due to the Nazi concept that the family shares responsibility for a crime, known as Sippenhaft, Küchenmeister's son Rainer was also jailed.

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.

[19] During this period she worked for the reformation of the KPD in Hanover and the surrounding districts, as old colleagues returned from the concentration camps and prisons.

For the next two years, Paul was director of the Division for Occupational Health Care in the German Economic Commission.