Hedwig Klein

Hedwig Klein (; 19 February 1911 or 12 September 1911 – after 11 July 1942) was a German Jewish Arabist and scholar, who was later murdered in Auschwitz.

Biography Hedwig Klein was born in Antwerp to Abraham Wolff Klein, a Hungarian oil wholesaler, and his wife Recha. She was the couple's second daughter. In 1914, the family moved to Hamburg. Two years later, her father was killed in combat on the Eastern Front during World War I. In January 1927, Hedwig Klein, her mother, and her sister, who was about a year older than Hedwig, became naturalized German citizens. and in the same year, she enrolled in the University of Hamburg to study Islamic studies, Semitic studies, and English philology. According to , who would later become a professor of Arabic, university teachers at the time were liberal and open-minded people, for whom anti-semitic views were beyond the pale. For that reason, Klein felt "safe" in her academic department. Dietrich said of Klein that she was:

In 1937, Klein completed her PhD dissertation, entitled Geschichte der Leute von 'Omān von ihrer Annahme des Islam bis zu ihrem Dissensus, which was a critical edition of an Arabic manuscript concerning early Islamic history. Klein also passed the Rigorosum with the mark of "excellent". This was shortly before Kristallnacht.

Klein decided to leave Germany. Freimark writes, "When she was in a desperate situation, Hedwig Klein received help and support from a man, whose effective and courageous efforts deserve praise and have not yet been recognized." The geographer Carl Rathjens arranged for Klein to receive a job offer in India. She left Hamburg aboard the ship Rauenfels on 19 August 1939. On 21 August 1939, she sent Rathjens a postcard from Antwerp on which she wrote: "In this pleasant weather, I'm feeling good on board the ship and I'm not worried about the future at this moment. No doubt, Allah will help me. I've believed that ever since I had the fortune to meet one of His friends.“ Klein returned to her family in Hamburg, where she lived through "all the torture", as Carl Rathjens would later describe it, from having to wear the Judenstern to being forced out of her family apartment into a lodging for Jews (Judenhaus). Despite Schaade's intervention, Hedwig Klein was deported on 11 July 1942 on the first train that left Hamburg for Auschwitz. After Hedwig Klein was deported, Schaade did not give up. In October 1942, he asked his Arabist colleague Adolf Grohmann, who was based in Leitmeritz, to search for the young woman and to hire her as an assistant. Grohmann, who was a party loyalist, provided no help. Grohmann did not think "that further work for the named person was any longer an option, if only on the grounds of prestige", as he wrote to Schaade on a postcard that bore the imprint "Heil Hitler".

Legacy

In order to exonerate himself, Hans Wehr claimed in his De-Nazification after 1945 that he had been able to save "Miss Dr Klein from Hamburg" from deportation by recruiting her for "work that was critical to the war effort", i.e. the Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic. When the dictionary was published in 1952, Wehr thanked "Miss Dr Klein" for her contribution in the foreword, but he did not mention what happened to her. The fifth edition of the dictionary was published in 2011 and it, too, failed to include any mention of Klein's murder.

"In an act of remembrance that was uncharacteristic for its time",

On 22 April 2010, Stolpersteine bearing the names of Hedwig Klein and other murdered Jewish academics were placed outside the main buildings of the University of Hamburg. Another Stolperstein bearing her name was placed outside her last known address in the Harvestehude district of Hamburg.