Kranz Willy

Kranz, Willi Leissner, Auguste Willy Kranz, born in Berlin in 1889, was the lessee of the canteen at the Berlin-Tegel Prison. He and his life-long companion and colleague, Auguste Leissner (née Schlatzke), born in 1893 in Cremerbruch, Pommerania, had their separate apartments at 94 Klosterstrasse. Sometime around March 1943, the prison chaplain, Harald Poelchau*, asked Kranz to help a Jewish girl called Rita Cohn, b.1934, who had gone underground. Until then, Rita had been hidden together with her mother, Leontine Cohen, in Poelchau’s apartment, but because Leontine had managed to arrange new accommodations and a job under a false name, a new, more appropriate hiding place had to be found for the girl. Kranz convinced his life-long companion to take the girl into her home. Rita remained there until the liberation. Leissner and Kranz presented her to visitors as their daughter. In 1946, Leontine and Rita Cohn immigrated to the U.S.A. In addition, Kranz and Leissner also often provided support to the Jewish musician Konrad Latte, in hiding since February 1943, in the form of food, money and passing on messages. After Latte left Berlin, Kranz tried to encourage him in his nerve-racking odyssey through the clandestine nether-world, writing to him, “Psychologically I live through your experiences with you every day, and I feel wretchedly dejected that in this big wide world a tiny soul can’t find a place, not to mention that I myself can do so little…” On April 28, 2002, Yad Vashem recognized Willy Kranz and Auguste Leissner as Righteous Among the Nations.