Martha Ruben-Wolf (17 June 1887 – 16 August 1939) was a German physician and author who became a political activist (KPD) after World War I.
On 16 August 1939 Martha Ruben-Wolf was still unaware of what had happened to her husband following his arrest on 27 November 1937 when, despairing, she committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.
She had studied subjects which were traditionally male preserves, but the labour shortages resulting from the slaughter of the First World War would open up opportunities after 1918 which most observers in 1914 would have regarded as still unrealistic.
Someone else who switched to the communist party around this time was Lothar Wolf (1882–1938), the son of a Jewish hotelier and another recently qualified doctor.
She was a co-founder of the Rote Frauen und Mädchenbund ("Red Women's and Girls' League" / RFMB) and in 1926 addressed the first national party congress.
Her provocative article-manifesto "Abtreibung oder Verhütung" (loosely: "Abortion or Prevention") appeared with a preface by Friedrich Wolf and was reprinted several times.
[2] During the 1920s and 1930s Lothar and Martha Wolf published a succession of travel reports, concentrating particularly on trips they made to the Soviet Union and Italy.
[2] She spoke out against § 218 of the German constitution- the "Abortion clause" which she dubbed the "Prison paragraphs" because of the threatened penalties they included for doctors and midwives.
[2] During the later 1920s the abortion issue became highly charged politically in Germany, and Martha Ruben-Wolf's activism gained increasing coverage; but it also drew hostility.
In 1929 copies of her pamphlet "Abtreibung oder Verhütung" (loosely: "Abortion or Prevention") were confiscated on orders from the regional court in Düsseldorf.
The scale of the personal risk changed after the Nazis took power at the start of that year and lost little time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship.
Their furniture and life insurance policies were confiscated by the state and their right to practice medicine cancelled through revocation of their membership of the local "Ärztekammer" (literally: "Chamber of Physicians").
Paris had become the informal capital in the west for exiled German communists and the Ruben-Wolfs made contact with various groups including physicians and authors.
It was, perhaps, prescient that they had already, in 1932, transferred 600 Marks to the "Weltoktober" housing co-operative in Moscow which would entitle them, it was said, to three rooms in one of the large Soviet style communal apartment buildings.
Martha visited the institution and wrote a strong letter of complaint about the unhygienic conditions and the failures of child care.
[2] Lothar Ruben-Wolf took a job with the All Union Institute of Experimental Medicine (WIEM) where he was set to work on fascist race theories.
As the political climate in Moscow turned increasingly ugly, Martha Ruben-Wolf experienced four months of unemployment, and then was given a relatively poorly paid job with Intourist, the state tourism agency.
[2] Although it took a few months for the realities of the Stalinist purges to become apparent, Martha Ruben-Wolf was forced to become aware of the extent to which friends were disappearing, notably after her husband was arrested by the security services on 28 November 1937 or 15 January 1938.