Between 1930 and 1936, she was employed in Schwenningen as a correspondence clerk, specialising in foreign languages, primarily French and English.
[2] In January 1933, the political context changed dramatically when the Nazi Party took power and converted Germany into a one-party dictatorship.
The charge was the usual one of preparing to commit high treason ("Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat"): on conviction she was sentenced to a 30-month jail term.
[2] He had been expelled by the Swiss to France in September 1937, but managed almost immediately to return to Switzerland where he established himself clandestinely in Basel as the leader of a Swiss-based group of German communists in exile.
[2] On her own release, in 1939, Paula also fled to Switzerland,[1] where she worked as a technical and editorial worker on the Basel based newspaper "Der Deutsche".
[2] Paula remained at liberty, working from 1944 in Geneva for Noel Field and his Unitarian Service Committee,[1] a US sponsored international refugees' welfare organisation.
Between 1945 and 1947, Paula Acker worked in local government back home in Schwenningen, where she was placed in charge of the social services department.
In 1951, Paula Acker, under instructions from the party, relocated to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) which had been founded in October 1949, as a reinvention of what had till that point been administered as the Soviet occupation zone.
[1] Between 1951 and 1958, she was worked for Lausitzer Rundschau, a newspaper based initially in Görlitz and subsequently in Cottbus, and was its editor-in-chief from 1955 to 1958.