Berthe Wild was born into a Protestant family of Swiss origin, but of the
Marseille bourgeoisie. She studied in Marseille and then in
Lausanne, and obtained her nursing diploma in June 1912. She worked in a military hospital during World War I. In 1919 she married a Dutch financier, Frédéric Albrecht, with whom she had two children, Frédéric (born in 1920) and Mireille (born in 1924). The couple lived first in the Netherlands, and then moved to London in 1924. It was in London that she met English feminists and became active in trying to improve the condition of women. Albrecht's husband's business failed after the 1929 financial crisis and the ensuing depression. They agreed that it would be better for her to return to France (initially to their house in Beauvallon, near
Sainte-Maxime on the French Riviera) in order to save money. Separated (but not divorced) from her husband, she and her children moved back to Paris.:64-65 There, she forged a friendship with
Victor Basch, a teacher at the
Sorbonne and the president of the
Human Rights League. Albrecht was an outspoken proponent of women's rights and she founded a feminist journal,
Le Problème Sexuel (
The Sexual Problem), in which she campaigned for the right to
contraception and
abortion. Financed by her husband, the journal published five issues, from November 1933 to June 1935.:83-88 In the fall of 1934, Albrecht visited the USSR and returned with a favorable impression of the Soviet Union's progress in such areas as women's rights, medical care, social assistance, schools, universities, nurseries and kindergartens.:88-91 In 1935, she helped found the Ethiopia Aid Committee. In 1933, conscious of the dangers of
Nazism and hostile to the
Munich Accords, Albrecht welcomed German refugees (mainly Jews and political dissidents fleeing fascism) to her house in Sainte-Maxime, where she met Captain
Henri Frenay, who was to survive the war and become one of the most famous living representatives of French resistance fighters. Despite their political differences (at that time, he belonged to the nationalist right wing, whereas she was actively associated with left-leaning causes), Albrecht and Frenay became both lovers and, later, co-organizers of the major resistance movement,
Combat.:94-96 In 1937, Berty did course work at the school of factory superintendents. She then became a social worker, working in an optical instrument factory.:112-115 == Resistance ==