[3][4] Grebing was born on 27 February 1930 in Pankow, Berlin, to a Roman Catholic father, who worked in the building trade, and a Protestant mother.

[2] She later said that it was her experiences in the BDM which sensitised her very early on to the potential for a return dictatorship inherent in the circumstances surrounding and following the creation of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in April 1946.

Directly after that, now aged 16 and the youngest in her cohort, Grebing responded to a newspaper advertisement and enrolled at the Workers' and Farmers' Faculty, a department of Berlin University, where she received a more academically focused year of secondary schooling.

This was part of an unusual scheme that was expressly aimed at school leavers to whom the opportunity of a university education would have been denied during the Nazi years on ground of politics, race or social background.

[2] Admission to the course involved an exam: one of her examiners was Hilde Benjamin, a name which later came to wider prominence in connection with the East German show trials of the early 1950s.

During the early postwar years a young activist in the Berlin SPD, recently returned from a wartime exile in Norway, was Willy Brandt, with whom at times Grebing found herself working closely on party matters.

Between 1959 and 1961, she headed the "Hans and Sophie Scholl" International Student Accommodation Centre, and was at the same time active in the Working Group of Social Democratic Academics ("Arbeitsgemeinschaft Sozialdemokratischer Akademiker") in Munich.

Between 1961 and 1965 she was a department chief at the massive Munich Popular Academy ("Münchner Volkshochschule"), with departmental responsibility for Politics, Sociology, Contemporary history, Economics and Law.

[3] In 1988 she switched to the Ruhr University Bochum where she took on a professorship for comparable history of the international labour movement and the social condition of the working classes.

[3] Along with her university research and teaching, Helge Grebing was a member of the Historical Commission of the SPD Party Executive.