German Resistance Memorial Center
- Biographies

Born in Kolberg in 1908, Erika Schönfeldt began working as a domestic servant in 1929 and later became a shorthand typist in Berlin. From the spring of 1941, she worked with Elisabeth Schumacher in the Reich Office for Labor Protection. Through her marriage to the artist Cay von Brockdorff in 1937, she joined the circle of regime opponents gathered around the actor Wilhelm Schürmann-Horster. In 1939 Hans Coppi, Karl Böhme, and Wolfgang Thiess began taking part in the circle's discussions. In 1941 a closer link formed to the circle of friends around Hans Coppi, who hid a radio device in Brockdorff's home that year, intending to repair it there with Karl Böhme and Kurt Schulze. In the summer of 1942, Erika von Brockdorff offered accommodation to the parachutist Albert Hößler and supported his attempts to make radio contact to the Soviets. She was arrested on September 16, 1942, and sentenced to ten years in a penal institution on December 19, 1942. The sentence was increased shortly later, in a new trial, to death. Erika von Brockdorff was murdered in Berlin-Plötzensee on May 13, 1943.