Margot Sponer

Margot Sponer (10 February 1898 – 27 April 1945) was a German philologist, teacher, freelance translator, and resistance fighter. She worked as a lecturer of Spanish at Friedrich Wilhelm University from 1929 to 1932, and again from 1937 to 1942. After her dismissal from the university, Sponer worked as a freelance translator while she was active in the resistance to Nazism, using her international contacts to help people escape from government persecution, which she was arrested for in 1942. She reportedly died in 1945 after being dragged out of her home and shot by members of the Schutzstaffel during the Battle of Berlin. She was the younger sister of physicist and chemist Hertha Sponer.

Biography

Early life and education Margot Sponer was born 10 February 1898 in Neisse, Silesia, then part of the German Empire, to merchant Robert Franz and Elsabeth Sponer , three years after the birth of her sister Hertha Sponer. In 1919, Sponer finished her secondary education in Quedlinburg, after which she studied Romance and Germanic philology, in addition to Arabic at universities in several cities: Halle, Leipzig, Neapel, Grenoble, Madrid and Berlin.

In April 1929, Sponer started working as an assistant teacher of Spanish at Friedrich Wilhelm University to support herself financially, prepare for exams, and complete her dissertation. She defended her doctoral thesis "Documents in Old Galician" in July 1931. The documents were procured from other linguists she encountered in Galicia and Portugal in the Summer and Autumn of 1926. and worked as a freelance translator, and was hired intermittently by the foreign ministry of Germany.