Third Reich
After the Nazis seized power in 1933, tension between the authorities and von Thadden's school began to grow. Von Thadden disregarded official edicts and continued to enroll Jewish girls at her school, sometimes even reducing the boarding fees in special cases. She also kept seeing her Jewish friends. Von Thadden was also not shy about stating her views out loud, and for this reason she was ever more under the Gestapo's gaze. Even a schoolgirl denounced the school to the Gestapo and the SD in October 1940, after the school had been evacuated to Tutzing in Bavaria because it had been too near the French Maginot Line. The Bavarian Culture Ministry threatened the school with closure for "activities endangering the state" because there was no portrait of Hitler hanging in the school building, and because at worship services, biblical – and therefore Jewish – psalms were being read. Von Thadden decided to take the school back to Wieblingen where she hoped that the school's widely acknowledged good name would keep the harassment away.
It did not, however. In May 1941, the Baden Education Ministry saw in von Thadden's school "no satisfactory guarantee for a National-Socialist-aligned education", whereupon the school was nationalized and Elisabeth von Thadden was unceremoniously suspended from the school's governing board without compensation.
Von Thadden went back to Berlin and joined the Red Cross as a nursing assistant. Here, according to her sister Ehrengard, she learnt, among other things, that letters reaching Germany from German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union had to be destroyed because Hitler believed that they would weaken morale at the front.
Read more about this topic: Elisabeth Von Thadden