Elisabeth Schiemann was awarded a doctorate in 1912 and worked as a specialist for plant genetics at an agricultural college in Berlin. She was granted permission to teach at university level in 1924, and went on to work as a lecturer.
She lived with her sister Getrud. From 1933 they supported Jewish friends and helped them to escape. Elisabeth Schiemann was a devout Protestant and was active in the Confessional Church from 1934. She urged the church to do more for persecuted Jews. As a geneticist, she also spoke out publicly against the National Socialists’ pseudo-scientific “race theory.” In 1940 her teaching permit was revoked on grounds of “political unreliability.”
When her friend, the musician Andrea Wolffenstein, had to escape deportation on January 11, 1943, she first found shelter with Elisabeth and Gertrud Schiemann.
In 1946 Elisabeth Schiemann was granted a professorship at Berlin University. The Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem honored her posthumously as Righteous Among the Nations for her resistance against the persecution of Jews in 2015.