Germany

د. محمد حلمي, فريدا شتورمان

ولد الدكتور محمد حلمي في الخرطوم سنة 1901 لأبوين مصريين. وفي سنة 1922 توجه إلى برلين لدراسة الطب واستقر فيها.  وبعد تخرجه، بدأ يعمل في معهد "روبرت كوخ" في برلين، ولكن تم فصله عام 1937. (وقد دلت دراسة قام بها معهد روبرت كوخ سنة 2009 على أن المعهد كان متورطا بشدة في السياسة الطبية... Read More Here

Oskar and Emilie Schindler

Schindler’s List Oskar Schindler was born on April 28, 1908 at Zwittau/Moravia (today in the Czech Republic). His middle-class Catholic family belonged to the German-speaking community in the Sudetenland. The young Schindler, who attended German grammar school and studied engineering, was expected to follow in the footsteps of his father and  take charge of the family farm-machinery plant. Some of Schindler’s schoolmates and childhood neighbors were Jews, but with none of them did he... Read More Here

Adolf and Maria Althoff

Rescue in a Circus Adolf Althoff's family had owned the famous Althoff circus since the 17th century. Adolf was born in 1913 in the family's circus wagon, while the circus performance was going on. When his older brother and sister took over the family enterprise in 1939, Adolf established his own circus. Shortly afterwards he married Maria, who was also from a circus family. The Adolf Althoff circus, which consisted of approximately 90 artists and their families, toured all over Europe, and... Read More Here

Wilhelm (Wilm) Hosenfeld

The “Pianist”s Rescuer Wilhelm Hosenfeld was born in a village in Hessen, Germany, in 1895. His family was Catholic and he grew up in a pious and conservative German patriotic environment. After serving as a soldier in World War I, he became a teacher, and taught at a local school. By the time World War II broke out, Hosenfeld was married and had five children. In the end of August 1939, a week before the German attack on Poland, 43-year-old Hosenfeld was drafted into the Wehrmacht (the... Read More Here

Heinrich and Maria List

"I felt sorry for him"   Heinrich (b. 1882) and Maria List (b. 1881), were Catholic farmers who lived in the predominantly Protestant village of Ernsbach in Hesse, where Maria had been born. Their son was a soldier at the front. One morning, sometime in the middle of November 1941, Ferdinand Strauss appeared at the List home and asked for refuge. The Lists had known the Jewish Strauss family through business contacts from before the war, and Ferdinand had come to their home seeking for help.... Read More Here

Karl Plagge

Major Karl Plagge was the commanding officer of HKP unit 562 (vehicle workshop) in Vilna. He was expansive in granting work certificates and was not particular about the professional skills of the Jewish workers. The workers at the garage included hair dressers, shoe makers and butchers. Plagge also supplied forged work certificates in order to rescue Jews from the prison and to transfer them to work in his unit. Following the first deportation from the Vilna Ghetto to Estonia in August 1943... Read More Here

Hermann Friedrich Graebe

The Witness to Murder Who Decided to Act Hermann Friedrich Graebe was born in 1900, in Gräfrath, a small town in the Rhineland in Germany. He came from a poor family – his father was a weaver and his mother helped supplement the family’s income by working as a domestic. Besides the economic hardship, the Graebes were Protestants who lived in a predominantly Roman Catholic area. In 1924 Hermann Friedrich Graebe got married, and soon completed his training as an engineer. Graebe joined the... Read More Here

Elisabeth Hedwig Leja Gessler

Edward and Dora Gessler, a Jewish couple, lived with their children, a cook and a housekeeper in the city of Beilsko Biala in Southern Poland. In 1938, Elisabeth Hedwig Leja, a Polish Catholic woman of ethnic German origin (Volksdeutsche) joined the family as a nanny and caretaker of the family’s three young children, Elek, 11, Lili, 4, and Roman, 1. At the outbreak of the war, rather than join her family in safety, Elisabeth chose to remain with the Gesslers and help them as they fled from... Read More Here

Dr. Mohamed Helmy and Frieda Szturmann

Rescued by an Egyptian in Berlin Dr. Mohamed Helmy was born in Khartoum in 1901 to Egyptian parents. In 1922 he went to Germany to study medicine and settled in Berlin. After completing his studies, he went to work at the Robert Koch Hospital in Berlin (later called Moabit Hospital), where he rose to the role of head of the urology department. Helmy became witness to the dismissal of Jewish doctors from the hospital in 1933. (A study conducted by the Robert Koch Institute in 2009 showed that... Read More Here

Bernhard Lichtenberg

Bernhard Lichtenberg was born on December 3, 1875 at Ohlau, some 30 kilometers southeast of Breslau in the then Prussian province of Lower Silesia. He was the second oldest of five siblings. The small merchant family of the Lichtenbergs belonged to the Catholic minority  in a predominantly Protestant city. In 1886 the Catholics made up some 31 per cent of the 15,787 strong population of Ohlau. There was also a tiny Jewish community of 123 (0.8%). Bernhard Lichtenberg obtained his Abiturium... Read More Here

Armin T. Wegner

Armin T. Wegner, the only writer in Nazi Germany ever to raise his voice in public against the persecution of the Jews, was born on October 16, 1886 in the town of Elberfeld/Rhineland (today part of Wuppertal).  He was the scion of an old aristocratic Prussian family, with roots reaching back to the time of the Crusades. After receiving his doctorate in law, the young Wegner tried his hand successively at being (in his own words) a “farmer, dock-worker, student of drama (with Max Reinhardt),... Read More Here

Otto Weidt

Otto Weidt (b. 1883), of working-class origins, was compelled by his growing blindness to abandon his work as a wallpaper hanger. He thereupon set up a workshop for the blind in Berlin Mitte, which manufactured brushes and brooms. Practically all of his employees were blind, deaf, and mute Jews. They were assigned to him from the Jewish Home for the Blind in Berlin-Stegliz. When the deportations began, Weidt, utterly fearless, fought with Gestapo officials over the fate of every single Jewish... Read More Here

Ilse Sonja Totzke

Rescue in Würzburg Ilse Sonja Totzke was born in 1913, in Strasbourg, the capital of the then German territory of Alsace-Lorraine. Her mother was an actress and her father was a theater orchestra director. In 1932, she went to Würzburg to study music at the local conservatory where she made several Jewish acquaintances and friends. She continued to associate freely with Jews even after the Nazis rose to power in 1933; she lodged at Jewish landlords’ and visited Jewish homes, generally... Read More Here

Gustav Schroeder

Gustav Schroeder was captain of the fateful voyage of the  St. Louis, which, in May 1939, set sail from Hamburg to the Americas with more than 900 Jewish passengers aboard.  After crossing the Atlantic, the fugitives from Nazi Germany - many of whom already had been arrested once in the wake of Kristallnacht in November 1938 - were denied entry by both the Cuban and the American authorities. The pariah ship was forced to turn back to Europe. However, instead of heading straight back to a... Read More Here

Alfred Rossner

Alfred Rossner was born in Oelsnitz in 1906, and grew up in nearby Falkenstein. Rossner never joined the Nazi party, and there is evidence to suggest that before the Nazi rise to power he had belonged to a Socialist youth organization. In the years before the war, he found employment at a Berlin textile plant owned by a Polish Jew by the name of Arje Ferleiger. Due to health issues, he was exempted from army service. About eight months after the German invasion of Poland, Rossner arrived in... Read More Here

Baron Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim

Baron Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim was born on October 5, 1900 in Cologne. He was a distant descendant of the German-Jewish banker Salomon Oppenheim, Jr, (1772-1828), who, at the end of the eighteenth century, had established in Cologne the famous banking house of Sal Oppenheim Jr. & Cie. The bank had played an important role in the industrialization of the Rhein-Ruhr region, especially through its involvement in financing the construction of railway and waterway communications and the... Read More Here

Gertrud and Reverend Otto Mörike

Reverend - and later dean - Otto Mörike (b. April 7, 1897) was a pastor of the Evangelical Church and one of the members of the “Bruderrat” (fraternal council) of the Confessing Church in Württemberg. The Bruderrat, in response to an appeal by its Berlin Branch, provided refuge and help to Jews “on the run”, especially during the final phase of World War II. Mörike consistently opposed the Nazi regime. On the occasion of the 1938 plebiscite on the annexation of Austria and Hitler's... Read More Here

Hermann Maas

Hermann Maas was born on August 5, 1877 in Gegenbach/Schwarzwald.  Through both his father’s and mother’s sides, he was descended from a family of Protestant pastors from Baden.  Having studied theology at the universities of Halle, Strassburg, and Heidelberg, in the autumn of 1900, he entered the office of curate, which was the beginning of a life-long career in the Protestant church. Since the days of the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, which Maas had visited out of curiosity while on a... Read More Here

Gertrud Luckner

Gertrud Luckner was born on September 26, 1900 in Liverpool, England, but had lived in Germany since early childhood. Having no siblings, she was left without a family after the early death of her parents. She studied economics, with a specialization in social welfare, at the universities of Königsberg, Birmingham-England (at the Quaker college for religious and social work), Frankfurt, and Freiburg. It was in Freiburg that she obtained her doctoral degree, in 1938.  Her dissertation was... Read More Here

Loni and Albert Harder

Loni and Albert Harder sheltered in their house in Palmnicken, a major amber-extracting and processing center (today known as Yantarny) on the Baltic, three Jewish women—Zelina Moshkowitz-Manielewitz, Miriam Zweig, and Genia Weinberg—who had escaped from one of the worst death marches initiated by the Nazis in the last phase of the war. Thousands of concentration-camp inmates—mostly women prisoners—who had been marched on foot in the dead of winter all the way from the Königsberg... Read More Here