[1][2] Paul Jahnke was born in Pasewalk, a small town supported by food and tobacco manufacturing, with an important junction on the railway network, a short distance to the west of Stettin in Pomerania.
[1] As the USPD itself broke apart in the confused aftermath of military defeat, Jahnke was part of the left wing majority that in 1919 moved across to the newly formed Communist Party.
By May 1933 Jahnke was already working "underground" not in Munich but in Bremen as regional policy head ("politischer Leiter des Bezirks").
His anti-Nazi activism in Germany had not gone unnoticed, however, and in 1936 a Nazi court condemned him, in absentia, to death[5] in the so-called "Richardstrasse-Prozess" ("Richard Street Trial").
[1] During 1939, the year in which the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union triggered the outbreak of the Second World War, Jahnke moved to the relative safety of Norway.
[7] In the event Norway, too, was overrun by the German army, and in 1940 the two of them fled to Sweden, supported by the Nansen Hjelp humanitarian organisation.
However, following differences with the managing editor of the Berliner Zeitung, Rudolf Herrnstadt, Jahnke resigned from the publishers and joined the country's quasi-military police service.
In 1951 Jahnke was relieved of all his politically connected posts and demoted to a positions as works manager at VEB Berliner Aufzugbau, a Berlin-based manufacturer of lifts/elevators.