Abegg, Elizabeth

Born March 3, 1882 in Strasbourg, in the family of a lawyer, officer and writer Johann Friedrich Abegg and Maria Carolina Elizabeth Abegg, nee Ram. Belonged to a cousin to the famous politician (1876-1951). She graduated from the . In 1912, one of the first women in the German Empire, she entered the University of Strasbourg , where she studied history, classical philology and romance. In 1916 she defended a dissertation on the history of the Italian Middle Ages at the University of Leipzig and received a doctorate in philosophy. In 1918, when Alsace became part of France, she moved to Berlin, where she took part in post-war relief work organized by the Quaker community. In 1924, she was hired by a teacher at the in the Berlin-Moabit district, one of the first girls' schools in Berlin ^{[1] [2]} .

She was engaged in active social activities in the Berlin-East community. In this organization, which provided social assistance to disadvantaged young people, especially young women, Pastor preached . During the Weimar Republic, she joined the German Party of Germany and maintained numerous contacts with democratically-minded compatriots.

In 1933, she opposed fellow teachers and high school students who supported Nazi propaganda and discrimination against Jewish teachers and students. In 1935, it was classified by the Nazi regime as “politically unreliable” due to the refusal to take the and transferred to work at the in the Berlin-Schöneberg district. Since the mid-1930s, has been in contact with . In 1938, she was interrogated by the Gestapo . In 1941, she had to leave teaching. In the same year, she officially joined the Society of Friends and became a Quaker ^{[1] [2]} .

Abegg began active assistance to Jews after the tragedy that happened to her Jewish friend Anna Girschberg, who was in July 1942 and died in the Auschwitz concentration camp two years later. Abegg offered her help, but she refused because of fear of violating the order of the Nazi authorities. The desire to save at least some people strengthened her listening to British radio programs in the house of , the father of one of his students. From them, she learned about the crimes of the Nazis in the occupied territories. According to her latest recollections, she and her disabled sister Julia in a three-room apartment in Tempelhof, where their mother lived with them, shelled a total of twelve people. In this apartment, she continued to give lessons to Jewish children ^[1] .

In February 1943, Abegg saved the kindergarten teacher Liselotta Pereles and her adopted daughter Suzanne Manasse from deportation. To ensure the escape of Jizczak Schversenz to Switzerland, she sold her jewelry. In addition to the Jews, Abegg helped and harbored those whom the Nazi authorities had persecuted for political reasons. Among them was . She found housing, food, clothes, money, and fake documents for them. Her former colleague , former students Lydia Forsstrom and Hildegard Arnold-Nice and their aunt Kristina Engler, Berta Becker, Richard Linde and Quaker friends helped her in this. For example, outside Berlin, there were contacts with the Bunke family in East Prussia and the seamstress Margrit Dobbeck in Alsace. Together, they saved about eighty people, most of whom survived. Although her activities were carried out in front of her neighbors, some of whom were active Nazis, the work of Abegg was not discovered by the Gestapo ^[1] .

After World War II, Abegg lived in West Berlin and worked as a teacher. She joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany and was an active participant in the Quaker movement in Berlin. In 1947, Abegg became one of the founders of the House of Friends in Mittelhof in the Berlin-Zehlendorf district, an institution that was supposed to make a sociocultural contribution to the democratization of post-war Germany. On February 27, 1957, the government awarded her the Federal Cross for Merit to Germany award. In the same 1957, a group of Jews whom Abegg saved during the Holocaust published a book about her under the title Light Shining in Darkness. On May 23, 1967, Yad Vashem awarded her the honorary title of Righteous Among the Nations ^[1] . She died on August 8, 1974 in West Berlin. On November 9, 1991, a memorial plaque was erected in the Tempelhof district in memory of her. On December 20, 2004, a street in the Berlin-Moabit region was named after Abegg ^[2] .

• Bender S., Borut J., Fraenkel D., Gutman Is. Lexikon der Gerechten unter den Völkern. Deutsche und Österreicher (German) . - Göttingen: Yad Vashem und Wallstein-Verlag, 2005 .-- ISBN 978-3-89244-900-3 .
• Elisabeth Abegg // Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (German) . - Nordhausen: Bautz, 2006. - Vol. XXVI. - P. 1-3. - ISBN 3-88309-354-8 .
• Einzigartig - Dozenten, Studierende und Repräsentanten der Deutschen Hochschule für Politik (1920–1933) im Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus (German) . - Berlin: Lukas-Verlag, 2008 .-- P. 82. - ISBN 978-3-86732-032-0 .
• Pereles L. Die Retterin in der Not // Die unbesungenen Helden. Menschen in Deutschlands dunklen Tagen (German) . - Berlin / Wien: Ullstein Verlag, 1984. - P. 85-93. - ISBN 978-3-548-33040-2 .
• Voigt M. Grüße von „Ferdinand“. Elisabeth Abeggs vielfältige Hilfe für Verfolgte // Sie blieben unsichtbar. Zeugnisse aus den Jahren 1941 bis 1945 (German) . - Berlin: Museums Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt, 2006. - P. 104-116. - ISBN 978-3-926082-27-5 .

• Elisabeth Abegg (German) . www.yadvashem.org . - Yad Vashem. Circulation date May 15, 2019.
• Elisabeth-Abegg-Straße (German) . www.berlin.kauperts.de . - Straßennamenlexikon des Luisenstädtischen Bildungsvereins. Circulation date May 15, 2019.