Born in Berlin, after the arrest of her father, the peace activist Carl von Ossietzky, in order to protect her from the Nazis her British-born mother sent her to England in 1933 and she later moved to Sweden.

After her father was arrested in 1933, in order to protect her from the Nazis, her mother arranged for her to be sent to a Quaker boarding school in England where she was trained as a dancer.

[1][3] She served as a social worker in Stockholm for almost two decades until her retirement, caring for indigenous migrants from the north of Sweden, drug and drink addicts and other desperate individuals.

By contrast, she found no such sentiments in East Berlin when she visited the newspaper Die Weltbühne which her mother Maud had re-established in 1946.

[1] Indeed, politicians from Lower Saxony had fought against the university's recognition of Carl von Ossietzky but thanks to Ossietzky-Palm's assistance, the new name was finally adopted.

[4] In an obituary to Ossietzky-Palm, the university's president Siegfried Grubitzsch stated that no one else had fought more strongly to restore interest in the great democrat.