Margarete Sommer

Margarete (Grete) Sommer (July 21, 1893 – June 30, 1965) was a German Catholic social worker and lay Dominican. During the Holocaust, she helped keep many Jews from deportation to death camps.

Biography Margarete Sommer was born in Berlin's Schöneweide neighbourhood in 1893. Her father was a railroad administrator. At the age of 19, she passed the exam as a primary school teacher and studied economics with a focus on social policy at the University of Berlin. Her studies also included philosophy, history and law in Heidelberg and Berlin. At the outbreak of the First World War, she worked as an auxiliary nurse in Maria-Viktoria Hospital of the Dominican Sisters. She joined the Third Order Dominicans and was active in a Catholic Students Association. In 1924 she became one of the few women of her generation to be awarded a doctoral degree. Sommer worked as an instructor at various welfare colleges. From 1927 she taught at the Social Welfare Institute of Pestalozzi-Fröbel House in Berlin, a charity that adhered to the ideas of liberal social reformer Alice Salomon. She was friends with Dominican Father Francis Stratmann, who was arrested in 1933 for preaching against Nazism and anti-Semitism. In 1934 Sommer was forced to resign for refusing to teach her classes the Nazi policy of the compulsory sterilization of disabled people. Now unemployed, she gave up her apartment in Berlin and moved with her mother and sister in Kleinmachnow on the outskirts of the city.

Following her dismissal from Pestalozzi, Sommer found work with various Catholic agencies who helped “non-Aryan” Christians emigrate from the Third Reich. In 1935, on Sommer took up a position at the Episcopal Diocesan Authority in Berlin, counseling victims of racial persecution with the Catholic aid agency, Caritas Emergency Relief. In 1939 she became diocesan instructor for the ministry for women.

Hilfswerk From 1939 she became increasingly active in the Welfare Office of the Berlin Diocesan Authority ("Hilfswerk"), and in 1941 she became managing director under the Cathedral Provost Bernhard Lichtenberg. After this, Sommer took operational charge of the agency, reporting to Bishop Konrad von Preysing. Her employees called her "the Sommerin".

In theory non-Aryan Christians were to be supported by the "Fund". In fact, the aid was provided to every Jewish citizen who contacted the Ordinariate.

While working for the Welfare Office of the Berlin Diocesan Authority, Sommer coordinated Catholic aid for victims of racial persecution, giving them spiritual comfort, food, clothing, and money. She corresponded with churchmen and ministers in England and USA, Central America and even in China to seek exit opportunities for her clients. Sommer used her expertise and connections to various government offices to monitor the advance of the “final solution”. She managed to get access to deportation lists and helped many by finding them hiding or exit opportunities.

Post war

After the war Sommer's residence in Kleinmachnow was in the Soviet occupation zone on the border of what was then West Berlin. Sommer started helping neighbors facing possible deportation to Siberia. She aided many to escape to West Berlin until she was forced to literally leave the newly founded GDR under cover of darkness in 1950. In 1949 she became a member of the Community for Christian-Jewish Cooperation. In 1952 she was assigned to work in the refugee ministry.

In 1953 Margarete Sommer was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit First Class. She died on June 30, 1965, in West Berlin.

Legacy

Much of Margarete Sommer's activities would have been considered "high treason" in Hitler's Germany. Despite great personal risk Sommer assisted many individuals to either emigrate from the Third Reich or find safe refuge. Detailed records of those rescued were not kept lest the information fall into the hands of the Gestapo. Witnesses recall more than a hundred managed or rescued people. In 2003 Margarete Sommer was posthumously awarded the honorary title of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

Margarete-Sommer-Straße in Berlin is named after her, as is Margarete-Sommer-Platz in Kleinmachnow.