Libertas "Libs" Schulze-Boysen, born Libertas Viktoria Haas-Heye was a German Prussian noblewoman, who became a resistance fighter against the Nazis. From the early 1930s to 1940, Schulze-Boysen attempted to build a literary career, first as a press officer and later as a writer and journalist. Initially sympathetic to the Nazis, she changed her mind after meeting and marrying Luftwaffe officer Harro Schulze-Boysen. As an aristocrat, Schulze-Boysen had contact with many different people in different strata of German society. Starting in 1935, she utilized her position to recruit left-leaning Germans into discussion groups which she hosted at her and Harro's apartment, where they sought to influence her guests. Through these discussions, resistance to the Nazi regime grew, and by 1936, she and Harro began to actively resist the Nazis. During the early 1940s, whilst working as a censor for the German Documentary Film Institute, Schulze-Boysen began to document atrocities committed by the Nazis from photographs of war crimes forwarded by soldiers of the Sonderbehandlungen task force to the Film Institute.

Elfriede Paul was a German physician and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. Paul, a small and energetic woman, was a communist member of the anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Paul was one of the few members of the Red Orchestra Group to survive imprisonment at the hands of the Gestapo. After the war, she was responsible for drafting health policies for the German Democratic Republic.