Martha Ruben-Wolf

The daughter of the small businessman Max Ruben and the women’s rights campaigner Regina Ruben, she studied medicine in Berlin after her school-leaving examination, finished in 1914 and took her doctorate in 1915. She worked in a military hospital during the First World War and afterwards set up as a gynaecologist in Berlin-Niederschöneweide, campaigning for working-class women. With her husband Lothar Wolf she was an active member of the KPD, and she co-founded the Red Women’s and Girls’ League. In the 1920s and early 1930s she and her husband published travel books on the Soviet Union and Italy, among them Moscow Sketches of Two Doctors (1926), German Doctors in the Caucasus (1928) and Fascist Land (1932). In books and articles on abortion she presented the Soviet Union’s position as exemplary, and her pamphlet Abortion or Contraception? (1929), with a foreword by Friedrich Wolf, reached a sixth edition and 150,000 copies by 1931; in 1930 she published Guidelines on Birth Control: The Successes of Soviet Russian Population Policy. As a well-known communist she stood in the Prussian Landtag election of 1928 and the Reichstag elections of 1930 to 1933. In February 1933 her husband fled with the family via Lugano and Paris to Moscow. There she worked again as a doctor but lost her post and was disillusioned by the changed abortion law. After her husband was arrested and executed as a “Gestapo spy” in 1938 she found work, after a long search, as a nurse and later again as a doctor, but she took her own life in Moscow on 16 August 1939. Her son Walter, conscripted into the labour army and the Red Army, fell in 1943. Since 1997 a street in Berlin-Altglienicke has borne her name.