Following qualification, Schimpf worked between 1924 and 1928 at the in Worpswede, a small town set in the flat marshlands to the north of Bremen that had become home to a lively artistic community since the end of the 19th century. was a large detached house that had been acquired by the artist-turned-pacifist Heinrich Vogeler in 1894, and which after the First World War was made available by its owner to "Red Aid", a communist led workers' welfare organisation with well-publicised links to its &lt;a href="International%20Red%20Aid"&gt;Moscow based sister organisation ("Междунаро́дная организа́ция по́мощи борца́м револю́ции" / МОПР)&lt;/a&gt;. Red Aid reconfigured the house for use as a rehabilitation home for the children of killed Communist activists and those who had been arrested and detained in the aftermath of the uprisings in the ports and industrial cities during 1918/19. Other sources emphasize the extent to which many of the children looked after in were "half-orphans" (the children of war-widow mothers) and children from families in which the fathers had been too badly wounded in the war to be able to find work and provide for their own children. According to at least one source the Barkenhoff children's home was organised on a "collective" basis. Elsewhere it is stated that Ella Schimpf/Ehlers was placed in overall charge of it in 1926 and ran it for the next two years.