Elisabeth Schiemann was born in Viljandi, Estonia,[2] at the time a part of the Governorate of Livonia in the Russian Empire.

[3] She was part of the first generation of women in Germany who were permitted to study and pursue independent careers as academics, although initially in a limited capacity.

From 1908 she studied at the University of Berlin and earned her doctorate there in 1912 with a thesis on mutations in Aspergillus niger; her supervisor was Erwin Baur.

As a Privatdozentin at the Agricultural University, she lectured on seed science and reproductive biology although her actual field of research was the history of cultivated plants.

[2][5] She openly spoke out against the so-called racial politics of National Socialism and its pseudo-Darwinism, against the persecution of Jews and abolition of the multi-party system.

[2][6][7] In 1943, Elisabeth Schiemann took over management of an independent crop history department at the newly founded Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Kulturpflanzenforschung (Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute of Crop Plant Research; now the Leibniz-Institut für Pflanzengenetik und Kulturpflanzenforschung [de], a division of the Leibniz Association) in the Tuttenhof section of Vienna; her department remained in Berlin.

They were Schiemann, theologian philosopher Liselotte Richter, Slavic languages expert Margarete Woltner and medical professors Auguste Hoffmann, Elisabeth Nau, and Dean Else Knake.

She helped sisters Valery and Andrea Wolfstein evade deportation and defended Jewish colleagues attending scientific symposia.