Sommer Margarete

Sommer, Margarete “For me she was absolutely a guardian angel” - that is how Sonja Schönerstedt (née Goldwerth) begins her report on Dr. Margarete Sommer, the Catholic welfare worker who saved her life. Margarete Sommer was born in Berlin’s Schöneweide neighborhood in 1893. After finishing her primary and secondary education, she specialized in political economy at the University of Berlin. In 1924, she became one of the few women of her generation to be awarded a doctoral degree. Her thesis was titled “The social welfare of imprisoned criminals. A socio-economic and socio-political study”. From October 1926 until mid-1934 she was employed as a lecturer on a full-time basis at the School for Social Welfare at the Pestalozzi-Fröbel House, but was forced to retire after she refused to include the Nazi racist ideology in her teaching. Following her dismissal from Pestalozzi, Sommer worked for various Catholic agencies who helped “non-Aryan” Christians emigrate from the Third Reich. From 1939 on, she became increasingly involved in the work of the Relief Agency (Hilfwerk) of the Berlin Episcopate founded in August 1938 at the initiative of Bishop Konrad Graf von Preysing. In October 1941, following the arrest of the head of the Hilfswerk, Cathedral Provost Bernhard Lichtenberg*, Sommer took operational charge of the work. The beneficiaries of her activity were for the most part “non-Aryan” Christians, but also a number of Jews whom she helped escape deportation. After September 1942, Minister Alfred Brinkmann and his sexton Robert Kaminski acted in consort with Sommer in providing the Jewish businessman and book printer Erich Wolff a hiding place in the heating cellar of the Herz-Jesu-Church. Another rescue case involved the Jewish girl Sonja Goldwerth and her brother Mojsche. After the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, the Polish-born father and his wife fled to France. Twelve-year-old Sonja and 11-year-old Mojsche were entrusted by their step-mother toa Catholic orphanage at 17 Ackerstrasse, pending their travel to England in a future Kindertransport. When the planned emigration came to naught with the outbreak of war, Sommer took charge of the children and directed them to various hiding places. Mojsche, who was caught near the Berlin Zoo in 1941, was deported to Buchenwald, but managed to survive. Sonja was hiding in 1944 in a small village in East Prussia when her identity was discovered. Taking advantage of the chaotic situation prevailing then in Königsberg (today Kaliningrad, Russia), the main city of the area, which had just been hit by an air raid, she managed to escape to Berlin. There she met Dr. Sommer who brought Sonja to her home at Kleinmachow, gave her food and warned her to stay away from the authorities. Subsequently, she took her to a Catholic asylum for young girls, where she survived the war. Dr. Sommer also used her legal expertise and connections to various government offices to monitor the advance of the “final solution” and the plans of the Third Reich to dissolve all “mixed marriages” – which would have given the authorities a free hand to deport the Jewish partners of these marriages to their death. She filed reports to the leaders of the Catholic Church in Germany, alerting them to the goings-on and exhorting them to take a firm stand on the issue of the “inalienable rights of all men” so as not to be “guilty of silence” before “God and humankind”. On May 5, 2003, Yad Vashem recognized Margarete Sommer as Righteous Among the Nations.