Margarete Sommer
Margarete (Grete) Sommer (July 21, 1893 – June 30, 1965) was a German Catholic social worker and lay Dominican. During the Holocaust, she helped keep many Jews from deportation to death camps.[1]
Biography[edit]
Margarete Sommer was born in Berlin's Schöneweide neighbourhood in 1893. Her father was a railroad administrator. At the age of 19, she passed the exam as a primary school teacher and studied economics with a focus on social policy at the University the of Berlin. Her studies also included philosophy, history and law in Heidelberg and Berlin. At the outbreak of the First World War, she worked as an auxiliary nurse in Maria-Viktoria Hospital of the Dominican Sisters. She joined the Third Order Dominicans and was active in a Catholic Students Association.[2] In 1924 she became one of the few women of her generation to be awarded a doctoral degree.[3] Sommer worked as an instructor at various welfare colleges. From 1927 she taught at the Social Welfare Institute of Pestalozzi-Fröbel House in Berlin, a charity that adhered to the ideas of liberal social reformer Alice Salomon. She was friends with Dominican Father Francis Stratmann, who was arrested in 1933 for preaching against Nazism and anti-Semitism.[4] In 1934 Sommer was forced to resign for refusing to teach her classes the Nazi policy of the compulsory sterilization of disabled people. Now unemployed, she gave up her apartment in Berlin and moved with her mother and sister in Kleinmachnow on the outskirts of the city.
Following her dismissal from Pestalozzi, Sommer found work with various Catholic agencies who helped “non-Aryan” Christians emigrate from the Third Reich. In 1935, on Sommer took up a position at the Episcopal Diocesan Authority in Berlin, counseling victims of racial persecution with the Catholic aid agency, Caritas Emergency Relief. In 1939 she became diocesan instructor for the ministry for women.