Katharina Winter

Katharina Winter (* February 4, 1901 in Hamburg as Margaretha Juliane Catharina Winter ; † May 16, 2005 in Berlin ) was a Berlin entrepreneur and supporter of the resistance fighters of July 20, 1944 .

Margaretha Katharina Winter was born in 1901 into a rich family of manufacturers from Hamburg (Carstens & Winter, Germany's largest meat and sausage factory, Flensburg). She spent her youth in Berlin and experienced the Roaring Twenties here . The attractive and self-confident woman was married to the Jewish antiques dealer Walther Eppenstein , who went into hiding after a forced divorce in December 1938 ( Giesebrechtstrasse 14) and was hid and financially supported by her. Her husband turned down the possibility of escape "bought" from the French ambassador. In March 1942 he was betrayed, tracked down by the Gestapo and shortly afterwards murdered in the gas chamber in the Majdanek concentration camp .

Margarethe Winter, as she called herself on business, ran one of the most exclusive shoe shops in Berlin at Kurfürstendamm 13 - ITALY -, founded the Ferragamo-Winter Schuhgesellschaft Berlin and was the sole importer of the elegant Salvatore Ferragamo shoes Florence. There were other shops in Neukölln on today's Karl-Marx-Straße (MaWi-Schuh) and in Hamburg, An den Colonnaden and Neuer Wall. When her shoe salon at Kurfürstendamm 13 was closed due to excessive luxury in the course of the general closure measures, she produced shoes herself in her apartment at Kaiserallee 32, now Bundesallee , and employed up to 18 shoemakers there. The sale continued in the private apartment. After the war, shoes were made from all possible materials.

The elegant shoe salon at Kurfürstendamm 13 was particularly popular with the women of the Nazi party celebrities. Here bought Magda Goebbels well as Eva Braun her shoes.

She supported the men of July 20, 1944 around Josef Wirmer , with whom she had a relationship for many years, with money and shelter. More than 100 handwritten letters, some of them political, are evidence of this. Several conspiratorial meetings between Wirmer and Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and Carl Friedrich Goerdeler took place in their apartment at Kaiserallee 32. However, she herself was not included in the talks and is therefore not considered a resistance fighter in the narrower sense. After the coup failed, she tried to organize an escape route for Wirmer, but the latter did not take advantage of it because, as Hitler announced, he feared reprisals against his family.

After the war, Margarethe Winter rebuilt her shoe stores in Berlin, Kurfürstendamm and Hamburg, Neuer Wall. In 1959 she went to New York , worked as a housekeeper for various "employers", including for many years with the royal Dutch ambassador Moritz van Lohen , and did not return to Berlin until 1971. She lived in Hamburg and Berlin and died in her apartment in Berlin at the age of 104.

Web links

• A love in times of war DIE WELT from July 20, 2001