Paula Kopp was born in Lichtensteig, a small town in the Swiss Canton of St. Gallen, a short distance from the three-way frontier with Germany and Austria. At the age of 21 she was already a member of the Communist Party of Germany. From 1928 she was working at Berlin in the secretariat at the international office of the Young Communists. From here she moved on to a job as a typist in the press department of the party central committee's own secretariat. She married Hermann Nuding in 1923 or 1925. The Nazi takeover in January 1933 was quickly followed by the switch to a one-party state, and at the end of February 1933, following the Reichstag fire, Hermann Nuding was among the first of a large batch of German Communists to be arrested and placed in "protective custody". Political work was now illegal and, as a paid official of the Communist Party, Paula Nuding accordingly lost her job and faced state persecution. She escaped via Copenhagen to France where Paris was rapidly becoming an ad hoc headquarters for the German Communist Party in exile. In Paris she worked on distribution for the "illegally" produced German language Communist newspaper "Volk und Vaterland" and for the Comintern.