Friedel Apelt (1 November 1902 - 12 December 2001) was a German political activist, trades union official and politician (KPD/SED). During the Nazi years she participated actively in anti-fascist resistance, and spent much of the time in prison or as a concentration camp internee. After the war she was able to resume her political career in the Soviet occupation zone (relaunched, in October 1949, as the German Democratic Republic). During a long political career she was married three times, and she may be identified in sources by any one of four names. Before her first marriage she was Frieda (or Friedel) Raddünz. After her first marriage, in 1925, she became Friedel Franz. Between 1946 and 1952 she was Friedel Malter. She retained her final name, Friedel Apelt, for nearly fifty years, between 1952 and 2001. Life Provenance and early years Frieda Anna Charlotte Raddünz was born in Breslau (known in English language sources, since 1945, as Wrocław). Her father worked as a typesetter. She attended middle school locally and then worked as a weaver and homeworker, initially still in Breslau between 1917 and 1923, and again between 1927 and 1930. During or before 1925 she appears to have been living in the village of Wüstewaltersdorf, some 80 km / 50 miles to the southwest of Breslau. Friedel Franz She married Adolf Franz, a miner, in 1925. He was a local Communist Party leader. In 1925 Friedel Franz joined the Textile Workers' Trades Union ("Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband" / DTV), remaining a member till her exclusion from it in 1929. She was also a works council member between 1927 and 1930. In 1926 she joined the Communist Party, becoming a member of the party's Breslau based regional leadership team ("Bezirksleitung") for Silesia, with special responsibility, between 1930 and 1933, for women's issues. As political tensions rose across Germany, in 1929 she became a member of the Revolutionary Union Opposition ("Revolutionäre Gewerkschafts Opposition" / RGO) movement. Between 1926 and 1933 Friedel Franz sat as a member of the Provincial parliament ("Landtag") for Lower Silesia. During the later 1920s she was also, for a period, a member of the district council for Waldenburg. In 1931 she became a member of the Prussian Provincial parliament ("Landtag") itself, joining between elections, presumably filling a seat vacated through the departure of another Communist Party member. She was the youngest of the party's 31 Prussian Landtag members. In the