Neff Dorothea

Neff, Dorothea (Schmid, Antonie) Schmitt, Meta Driessen, Martha-Maria The rescue story of the Jewish dress designer Lilli Wolff revolved around the three cities of Köln, Berlin, and Vienna, and involved three women rescuers. All four women shared common professional and business ties and had known each other long before the war. war. Wolff had already met Meta Schmitt (b. 1890 in Bonn) in 1918. Two years later the friends opened a fashion and costume design studio in Köln. Martha-Maria Driessen (b. 1910) came into the business in 1932, as a volunteer employee, and the Viennese actress Dorothea Neff (b. 1903), the principal figure in the rescue story, was introduced by a friend in 1934. During the first years of Nazi rule, the business was permitted to operate more or less as normal and employed up 40 people. This persisted until November 1938, when Wolff was forced to leave the partnership. Antonie Schmid (stage name Dorothea Neff) was born in Munich, Germany in 1903. A professional stage actress, Schmid was fired from her local theater in 1933 on suspicions of political disloyalty. She moved to Köln, Germany, then to Königsberg, and in 1939 arrived in Vienna where she joined the Volkstheater and became famous under the stage name Dorothea Neff. Neff was acquainted with many Jews who were connected to the arts. Counted among her friends was Lilly Wolff, the costume designer for the Jewish Theater of Berlin. The two women became fast friends. In September 1940 Wolff moved to Vienna, thinking that it would be easier to be a Jew there than in Köln. However, the owner of the apartment soon canceled the lease. Thanks to the intervention of the theater director, Wolff was able to rent an empty apartment with the cost of furnishing the apartment defrayed by Schmitt and Driessen. Sometime later, Neff began to pay a monthly sum for taking her Jewish lodger off the list of the mandatory labor employment.For a number of months Neff bribed a local bureaucrat so that he would not include Wolff in the list of those Jews required to work. In the winter of 1941, Wolff received a deportation notice to the east. She tried to find a place to hide in Berlin but failed and returned to Vienna, where Neff offered her a place to hide in her house. At the end of 1941, a couple of days before the expulsion was to take place, Neff reported Wolff missing. Wolff went underground and didn’t leave Neff’s apartment in Annagasse 8 again until April 1945. Throughout the period that Wolff was hiding in her home, Neff limited her social life and avoided developing any close personal relationships, because such relationships would increase the chance that Wolff would be discovered. However, as a stage actress, she could not live in complete isolation. Whenever a guest came to Neff’s apartment, Wolff would go into a special hiding place and remain there silently until the guest left. In August 1944, Wolff became ill, and had to have an emergency operation. Using her old German identity card, Neff brought Wolff to the hospital, presenting her as a relative from Köln named Antonie Schmid (Neff’s original name, which she had never used in Austria). Wolff received treatment and soon recovered. Wolff told Yad Vashem that Dorothea's brother and sister-in-law warned her that she was endangering herself and advised her not to give shelter to a runaway Jewish woman. "I am unspeakably thankful", said Wolff in 1979, "to her. She has done all she could to make my life easy, to make me feel that I am a human being (against Nazi propaganda), that I was worth of her care she bestowed so warmheartedly on me." During all the time that Wolff was hiding in her apartment, Neff received help from only a few individuals. The two friends from Köln – Meta Schmitt and Martha Maria Driessen visited occasionally, bringing food-ration cards, clothes and other small items. When, in 1942, Wolff thought she had a chance to acquire a forged passport for 3,500 Marks, she called Driessen in Köln. The latter borrowed the money from the owner of the Kölnische Zeitung, who was well aware of the purpose of the loan he advanced. Driessen even made a special trip to Vienna to give the money to Wolff. But the passport never came. The man who had promised to supply it turned out to be a swindler. Nevertheless, Driessen and Schmitt repaid the loan in full.Toward the end of the war, Neff disclosed her secret to a young actress at the theater, who also began to collect food stamps for Wolff. Neff endangered herself by hiding a Jew in her home, an act that could have led to deportation to a concentration camp, and eventually to death. The risk to Neff increased during the aerial bombardment of Vienna, because at that time she took Wolff down to the basement of her building to hide, together with her neighbors, telling them that Wolff was a relative from Köln. Neff didn’t receive any payment for her actions, and shared her food with Wolff for almost four years. On April 9,1945, the Russians controlled Vienna, and at last Wolff came out of hiding. After the war, Neff continued to work as a stage actress. In 1967, she went blind. In 1947, Wolff moved to Dallas, Texas, where she became a well-known fashion designer. On September 13, 1979, Yad Vashem recognized Dorothea Neff, Meta Schmitt, and Martha-Maria Driessen as Righteous Among the Nations.