Margareta Burkill

Margareta "Greta" Burkill born Margareta Braun (1 December 1896 – 14 June 1984) was a German-born British refugee worker who was a member of the Cambridge Children's Refugee Committee. They brought hundreds of children to the UK from 1933 onwards on the Kindertransport. She later became an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College.

Life Burkill was born in Berlin in 1896. Her father was an Austrian journalist who worked in Germany, subsequently a newspaper editor in Nuremberg and, after the First World War when he acquired German nationality, a socialist member of the Weimar Reichstag. She was educated in Bavaria, St Petersburg and, after her parents divorced and her Russian-born mother remarried an Englishman, at Harrogate Ladies' College. From 1917 she was a student at Newnham College, Cambridge. This was as part of the Kindertransport however many of those help were older and their studies had been interrupted by changes in Nazi Germany. Two of the refugees became noted mathematicians and Harry Burkill, whom the Burkills unofficially adopted.

In the 1950s Mrs Burkill founded a 'Junior Graduate Club' (later the Cambridge University Graduate Union) for postgraduate students of the University of Cambridge and a Society for Visiting Scholars, for the spouses of academics visiting that University.

Death and legacy Burkill died in Cambridge in 1984. Her husband put her papers in order regarding her work with refugees and they are held in Cambridge University Library. He survived her until 1993. In 2017 her alma mater Newnham had an exhibition of the work by the Cambridge Children’s Refugee Committee. A biography of the life of Mrs Burkill entitled 'Greta Burkill: Mother to Thousands' appears in the Peterhouse Annual Records of 2012/2013 pp. 1–138 and 2015/2016 pp. 1–134.