Dobbeck Margarethe

Hinz, Hermann Hinz, Clara Dobbeck, Margarethe Emil Stargardter and his wife Gertrud lived in the same building as Hermann and Clara Hinz. In 1941, as the situation of Jews in Germany became very difficult, the Hinzes helped their Jewish neighbors, gave them food to supplement the meager rations allocated to Jews and, after Stargardter’s wife underwent surgery, Clara Hinz took care of her. In February 1943, the last remaining Jews of Berlin were deported. The Stargardters decided not to report to the assembly point but instead to embark on an illegal life in hiding. They moved from one place to another, and from time to time stayed in a cabin in the Berlin suburbs belonging to the Hinzes. The cabin was part of a garden colony where Berliners grew vegetables. The Hinzes brought them food, and looked after all their needs. They also helped Dr. Bessunger, a Jew who was married to a non-Jewish woman. By the end of 1943, as the bombing of Berlin intensified, the Stargardters found it more and more difficult to find places of shelter, and decided to leave Berlin. They managed to reach Mulhouse in the Alsace, where they took shelter in the home of Margarette Dobbeck, whom they had met in Berlin where Dobbeck lived for a couple of years before returning to her native Mulhouse. Dobbeck also hid Flora Wolff, first in Berlin and then from October 1943 until November 1944 in Mulhouse. In a statement from 1963, Wolff wrote that she had met the Stargardters at Dobbeck’s home in Mulhouse. After the war, Emil Gertrud Stargardter returned to Berlin and then immigrated to Israel, where they settled in Haifa. Stargardter’s three brothers were murdered in the Holocaust. Emil Stargardter wrote a long report about the war years, but contact with his rescuers was lost. On April 30, 2013, Yad Vashem recognized Hermann and Clara Hinz and Margarethe Dobbeck as Righteous Among the Nations.