[1][2] Paula Kopp was born in Lichtensteig, a small town in the Swiss Canton of St. Gallen, a short distance from the three-way frontier with Germany and Austria.
The Nazi takeover in January 1933 was quickly followed by the switch to a one-party state, and at the end of February 1933, following the Reichstag fire, Hermann Nuding was among the first of a large batch of German Communists to be arrested and placed in "protective custody".
[4] Political work was now illegal and, as a paid official of the Communist Party, Paula Nuding accordingly lost her job and faced state persecution.
[1] Following the outbreak of the Second World War in the later summer of 1939, France was invaded by the German army in May/June 1940: the northern part of the country was directly occupied while the south was administered by a collaborationist government.
She was one of the founding members of the Democratic Women's League ("Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands" / DFD) and campaigned for restitution on behalf of former concentration camp inmates.