Elli Paula Schmidt (9 August 1908 – 30 July 1980) was a German communist political activist with links to Moscow, where as a young woman she spent most of the war years.

She returned in 1945 to what later (in 1949) became the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) where she pursued a successful political career till her fall from grace: that came as part of a wider clear out of peoples critical of the national leadership in the aftermath of the 1953 uprising.

[1] In 1948 Schmidt became the first head of the Democratic Women's League ("Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands" / DFD), one of several government backed mass organisations included in the highly centralised power structure then being developed for the country.

[4] In 1934 she was appointed policy-leader[1] and trades union instructor for the underground party operation in the "Lower Rhine Region" ("Bezirk Niederrhein").

She had to flee to Prague in 1937,[6] and from there moved on to Paris where she worked as a member of the Central Committee Secretariat with the German party leadership in exile between 1937 and 1940.

[4] When the German Army launched their invasion in June 1941 she was evacuated to the spa settlement of Lesnoi (Krasnye Baki) on the Vetluga River, returning to Moscow in 1942 after the crisis had peaked.

[1] According to one source, during her time in Moscow Elli Schmidt began to live with the comrade generally identified by his party pseudonym as Anton Ackermann, a leading member of the team that would embark on a carefully choreographed nation building programme under the leadership of Walter Ulbricht in the Soviet occupation zone after April 1945.

However, on 30 April 1945 a group of thirty men – the so-called Ulbricht Group – arrived from Moscow by plane in Berlin, keen to waste no time in implementing their project for the Soviet occupation zone, a large central chunk of what had previously been Germany, sandwiched between the three "western" occupation zones and the eastern third of what had been Germany, which was now incorporated into Poland, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

It was clear that the development was intended to apply across the whole of Berlin, and it is not impossible that if matters had turned out differently it would also have extended across the British, French and American occupation zones of Germany.

In the event the Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED) took root only in the part of the country administered as the Soviet occupation zone.

[1][2] Schmidt was a member of the executive board of the Democratic Women's League of (East) Germany ("Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands" / DFD) from its launch in March 1947.

In order to broaden the structural support and legitimacy of the government, five mass organisations - of which the DFD was one - were allocated a quota of seats in the national parliament ("Volkskammer").

[1][14] In 1950 Schmidt was appointed to head up the "Commission for drafting legislation on protection of mothers and children" ("Kommission zur Ausarbeitung des Gesetzes über den Mütter- und Kinderschutz").

[1] At the Third SED Party Conference, held at the Werner Seelenbinder Sports Hall in East Berlin in July 1950, Elli Schmidt was elected a candidate for membership of the Politburo of the Central Committee.

[16] The street protests were suppressed very quickly, partly thanks to the unhestitating fraternal intervention on behalf of the forces of law and order by Soviet troops.

[17] A number of comrades were still sufficiently shaken up by the June events to depart from their customary discretion, and openly to voice their criticisms of the Central Committee First Secretary.

[17][e] "The quick fixes, the lies, the running away from people's worries, the threats, the boastings - that has brought us to this point: for that, dear Walter, you bear more culpability than anyone, and that is what you will not admit, that without all that June 17 would never have happened".

In any imminent power struggle within the East German establishment it could therefore be assumed that the influence of the Communist Party in Moscow would be exerted in opposition to the Zaisser-Herrnstadt partnership.