[5] In 1925 Friedel Franz joined the Textile Workers' Trades Union ("Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband" / DTV), remaining a member till her exclusion from it in 1929.

On 15 August 1934 she faced the special "People's Court" and was sentenced to three years in prison, convicted in respect of the standard charge of "preparing to commit high treason" ("Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat").

[2] She served her three-year prison sentence in Jauer before being transferred to the concentration camps at Moringen and then Lichtenburg where she spent a further two years in "protective custody".

The 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler failed in its objective, but succeeded in persuading the government of heightened terrorist risks on the home front.

In 1999, more than fifty years later, at the age of 97, having become through marriage Fridel Apelt, she was still involved in a meeting held at the nearby Wentowsee Hotel, at which concentration camp survivors met Daimler-Benz executives in order to discuss wages and fair recompense ("Lohn und Würde") in respect of their time as forced labourers at the Genshagen plant.

On 4 May 1945, while undertaking one of the so-called death marches of camp inmates towards the west, Friedel Franz managed to escape captivity in the Prignitz region.

[3] The official whom she met explained that it was not possible for her to return home to Breslau and therefore sent her to a municipal soup kitchen ("Ernährungsamt" / literally: feeding office).

[3] Following the ethnic cleansing of 1944/45 and the accompanying frontier changes, her Silesian home region remained out of reach after the war ended, formally in May 1945.

The DFD displayed several of the features of a political party, and was allocated a (fixed) quota of seats in the national parliament ("Volkskammer") by the SED.

[9] By this time, in November 1952, she had married Fritz Apelt [de], another member of the East German ruling establishment and, in common with the country's leaders, a former communist functionary who had spent most of the twelve Nazi years in Moscow.

Friedel Apelt retired from all her full-time posts in 1956 on health grounds, although she continued to hold a number of less onerous, honorary and part-time positions.

[7] Between 1959 and 1990 Friedel Apelt chaired the East German Human Rights Committee, an FDGB initiative that initially focused on West German citizens disadvantaged by the 1956 constitutional court ban on the Communist Party, although Apelt's committee later extended its remit to include persecuted left wing leaders from more distant countries, such as the Chilean Luis Corvalán and the South African Nelson Mandela.

[2] Like many long-surviving senior politicians and officials from the German Democratic Republic,[10] Apelt lived out her final years in the "Clara Zetkin Old People's Home" ("Senioreneinrichtung Clara-Zetkin-Heim") in Berlin's Friedrichshagen quarter.

[1][2][3] Virtually till the end of her life she was involved in the debate over restitution for former concentration camp inmates who had been forced to work at the Genshagen Daimler-Benz plant.