Hedwig Porschütz

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Hedwig Porschütz , née Völker , (born June 10, 1900 in Berlin-Schöneberg ; † March 26, 1977 in Berlin ), was a German resistance fighter against National Socialism , whose prison sentence and, at times, work as a prostitute during her lifetime were taken as an opportunity for her each To refuse appreciation. Only posthumously was she honored as Righteous Among the Nations .

Berlin memorial plaque on the house, Feurigstrasse 43, in Berlin-Schöneberg

Origin and life until 1941

Porschütz came from a simple background. The father, a brewery worker , died in 1937; her mother, who supported her in her underground work against the National Socialists , died in 1956. After leaving school in 1914, Porschütz went to business school and then worked as a typist in a factory, and later for a health insurance company. Around 1926, Porschütz married Walter Porschütz, who was a year his junior and worked as a chauffeur and waiter; the couple lived in an attic at 5 Alexanderstraße across from Berlin's police headquarters . Probably because of unemployment , Porschütz started prostitution around 1929. The Porschütz couple got caught up in petty crime ; Hedwig Porschütz was sentenced to ten months in prison in 1934 for extortion .

Resistance, condemnation

Porschütz had been in close contact with the manufacturer Otto Weidt since around 1940 . With the beginning of the deportation of Berlin Jews to the extermination camps in autumn 1941, a network of people came into being in his brush factory at Rosenthaler Strasse 39, who helped the Jews threatened with murder . Porschütz joined this illegal aid that was threatened with the death penalty ; she was particularly at risk because of her criminal record. Her husband was a soldier until the end of the war , so he did not stay in Berlin and did not take part in his wife's auxiliary work.

At the beginning of 1943, Porschütz changed jobs as a stenographer from the Lichtenfeld replacement fund to the Otto Weidt brush factory, which he operated as a workshop for the blind . There she became acquainted with the Jew Inge Deutschkron , who was temporarily protected from deportation in the workshop. Porschütz took over the procurement of food and other necessary goods on the black market , possibly because of the familiar circumstances from the milieu . Since the rationed groceries could only be bought using state-issued grocery cards , which Jews had insufficiently and ultimately illegally , they were dependent on this illegal procurement of groceries. For Inge Deutschkron and her mother, Porschütz also obtained forged papers for the purpose of hiding.

The twins Anneliese and Marianne Bernstein, born in 1922, also owe their survival to Porschütz. When asked about it by Weidt, Porschütz took them both into their small apartment, provided them with groceries they had bought on the black market and passed them off to the household as a niece and their friend. The Bernstein siblings had to go through the air raids in their apartment, which were particularly dangerous for the Jews living in hiding , because a visit to the air raid shelter would have resulted in their exposure as the repetition increased. When, after around six months and a police operation in a neighboring apartment, the situation was judged to be too risky, Porschütz found the two sisters a new hiding place in Berlin-Wilmersdorf and continued to supply them with illegally procured food. Anneliese and Marianne Bernstein survived; they emigrated to the United States in 1946, where at least Anneliese Bernstein lived until 1992 at least.

In addition to the Bernstein sisters, Porschütz took Grete Seelig and her niece Lucie Ballhorn into their attic apartment in March 1943, where they temporarily housed four Jewish women in hiding. At times Seelig and Ballhorn lived with Porschütz's mother. In October 1943, Lucie Ballhorn was arrested and murdered in Auschwitz .

With great effort Otto Weidt organized the supply of at least 25 people who were imprisoned in the Theresienstadt ghetto with food packages that were sent using numerous bogus senders. Of the thoughtful people, three survived; the others were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in autumn 1944 and murdered there.

In May 1944, an acquaintance of Porschütz was arrested while trying to buy bacon with forged food stamps. As a result, she was detained in September 1944 and October 2, 1944 by the Special Court III at the Berlin District Court to one and a half years prison sentenced. The fact that she had manufactured and used the counterfeit food stamps, particularly to care for Jews in hiding, had apparently not been established by the police. The judgment made explicit reference to her past as prostitutes. Porschütz served his imprisonment in the Jauer women's prison in Silesia and in the Zillerthal-Erdmannsdorf labor camp until the end of the war . Then she returned to Berlin.

post war period

The house on Alexanderstrasse had become uninhabitable as a result of the war. Porschütz moved to Feurigstrasse 43 in Berlin-Schöneberg. Hedwig and Walter Porschütz, who had returned from the war, were both chronically ill; they were impoverished. In 1956, Porschütz applied for recognition as a politically persecuted person. The application was rejected on the grounds that her auxiliary work for persecuted Jews was not suitable for politically undermining the National Socialist regime. The authorities also found that Porschütz's 1944 conviction for war economic crimes "suggests such a low moral and moral level that even if the prerequisite for recognition was not met in this case for objective reasons anyway, this would no longer be met . Recognition as a PrV [politically or racially persecuted] is an honorary document and can only be issued for corresponding personalities. ”In the negative internal note on Porschütz's application for aid from the fund“ Unsung Heroes ”from the Berlin Senator for the Interior from October 1958 says It: "Ms. Porschütz would be eligible for recognition from the 'Unsung Heroes' campaign if the reasoning for the judgment of October 2, 1944 did not indicate that the circumstances surrounding the procurement of the food were of such a low moral and moral standard to close Frau Porschütz, who, according to the local opinion, make it impossible to honor the event. The applicant pursued the fornication on a commercial basis in earlier years and, even until her conviction in 1944, had indiscriminately interacted with strangers despite her marriage. Reference is made to the comments on the judgment. When assessing the applicant, it should also be taken into account that before her arrest in 1934 she was sentenced to 10 months in prison in one case by the Berlin lay judge's court for completed and attempted extortion and that she also served this sentence. "

This rejection of their application is in contrast to the fact that in the Week of Brotherhood in 1959 Otto Weidt, for whom Porschütz was helping, was praised. Porschütz 'judge from 1944, District Court Judge Joachim Wendt , had been reassigned to the judiciary in 1953. In 1980 Wendt justified his judgments, including numerous death sentences, with the remark: “I have absolutely nothing to reproach myself with. Hard times, hard judgments ”.

Hedwig Porschütz died on March 26, 1977 in a Berlin retirement home. Her grave in the old village cemetery in Schöneberg was closed in 2000. There is no picture of Hedwig Porschütz.

Posthumous appreciation

On June 3, 2011, the judgment against Hedwig Porschütz was overturned by the Berlin public prosecutor. The annulment decision states that the judges of the special court “did not see themselves as applying the law, but as part of a 'fighting force' and as political fighters for Hitler . The “jurisprudence” did not serve to protect the law, but to fulfill the “will of the leader” ”.

In November 2010 Hedwig Porschütz was honored as part of the Berlin memorial plaque program , next to her name and the dates of life, the plaque on her former home carries the text:

"In 1943 and 1944, she hid several Jewish women in her apartment at Alexanderstrasse 5 and thus saved them from being deported to an extermination camp."

The Berlin memorial plaque was attached to her former home on November 13, 2012, Feurigstrasse 43 in Berlin-Schöneberg .

The Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem honored Hedwig Porschütz as Righteous Among the Nations . In June 2015, a memorial event for them was held at the Silent Heroes Memorial Center in Berlin, at which Israeli ambassadors also remembered their efforts to save human lives.

In February 2018, the District Assembly (BVV) Berlin-Mitte decided to name a street in the new building area north of Berlin Central Station to Hedwig Porschütz, if there is a need for a new street there. Later that year, a newly built road in the area was actually named after her.

literature

Web links

Commons : Hedwig Porschütz  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
  • Johannes Tuchel: A woman in Berlin. In: The time. No. 30, July 19, 2012.
  • The Righteous Among The Nations: [1]

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Steinbach: Correction of a defamation.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on: museum-blindenwerkstatt.de@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.museum-blindenwerkstatt.de  
  2. ↑ Just among the peoples , taz article from June 13, 2015, accessed on June 13, 2015
  3. ↑ In honor of Hedwig Porschütz. Retrieved December 7, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Porschütz, Hedwig
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Peoples, Hedwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin-Schöneberg
DATE OF DEATH March 26, 1977
Place of death Berlin