Neyses Joseph & Hilde (Moellenhoff)

Neyses, Joseph Neyses, Hilde Luise Ottilie Professor Joseph Neyses (b. 1893) and his wife Hilde (née Möllenhoff) harbored the newly widowed wife of a non-Jewish acquaintance from September 17, 1944, until the entry of the Americans to Düsseldorf on March 3, 1945. Neyses had offered the Jewish woman, Erna Etscheid, refuge in his home soon after the death of her Aryan husband in March 1944. However, at first Etscheid did not want to accept the generous offer, as she was very aware at what risk it would put the Neyses family. Only in mid-September 1944, when she received a summons from the Gestapo to report to the city abattoir for transport to an unknown destination did she finally decide to go to the Neyses’ home in Düsseldorf-Oberkassel. The Neyses couple kept her hidden in the basement of their home until the liberation. During the entire period of her “illegal” hiding, Etscheid remained in the basement and could not go down to the air-raid shelter, even during the ever-intensifying air raids, for fear of being discovered. On April 2, 1981, Yad Vashem recognized Prof. Dr. Joseph Neyses and his wife Hilde Luise Ottilie as Righteous Among the Nations.