Kathe Overath

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Käthe Overath b. Meier (born September 16, 1926 in Lohmar - Donrath ; † November 23, 1995 ) there was a Righteous Among the Nations .

Life

Käthe Overath was the daughter of Albert Meier (* 1894) and his wife Maria, geb. Henseler (* 1895). She grew up in a strictly Christian family and first attended elementary school in Siegburg and then the business school. The parents were deeply religious Catholics who came into conflict with the National Socialists on several occasions after the seizure of power . Albert Meier in particular had become a determined opponent of National Socialism at an early stage . In 1939 he was taken into police custody for allegedly "undermining popular morality".

While other families had distanced themselves from their Jewish fellow citizens after 1933, the Meiers did not break off contact with the Bernauer family from Troisdorf, who had been friends for years, and initially supported them with clothes and food.

Erwin Bernauer (1886–1961), owner of a photo studio, was born in contrast to his Jewish wife Nanny. Stern (1880–1960) of Catholic faith. Since their marriage was considered a privileged "mixed marriage" due to his proven Aryan descent , she and their daughter Karola Helene (1919–2002) initially remained comparatively unmolested, while most of the other Jewish residents of Troisdorf had been deported since 1941. In September 1944, Nanny Bernauer also received the notification that she and her daughter had to go to the “Jewish camp” in Cologne-Müngersdorf : On September 11th, she was picked up by a truck. Erwin Bernauer, although not a Jew himself, did not want to part with his wife and stayed by her side. Together with other Jews from Troisdorf and the surrounding area, they were taken to Fort V, a former fortress prison that had served as a collection point for deportations to Eastern Europe since 1941.

When Karola Bernauer was supposed to get medicines for some of the sick inmates outside the camp, she took the opportunity to escape and turned to Käthe Overath and her mother. Albert Meier had already been called up for military service in the summer of 1944. Mother and daughter hid the Jewish girl in their own house and now had to constantly fear that they would be discovered and betrayed. They also smuggled food together into the Müngersdorf camp so that Erwin and Nanny Bernauer could survive the days before the planned transport to Theresienstadt .

Shortly before the threatened deportation of the couple, the young Käthe Overath decided in autumn 1944 to undertake a daring rescue operation. In order to be able to get into the camp unhindered and to deliver the food, she started a conversation with the SS guards, in the course of which she declared that she wanted to pick up her parents, who were working in the kitchen. After waiting some time, Overath finally asked the guards if she could go into the camp to see where her supposed parents were staying for so long. The guards agreed on the condition that Käthe Overath agreed to meet them the next day. Overath soon succeeded in locating the Bernauers in the camp. A spontaneous inspiration, following, Kathe Overath hid the Jewish star Nanny Bern Auer, who was for Jews duty since September 1, 1941 under scarf and coat, and the couple took to her side. The three of them then went to the exit together and cursed the Jews demonstratively, so that the guards did not suspect anything and merely reminded Overath of their appointment.

Käthe Overath and her mother initially hid the two refugees and their daughter in the basement of their Donrath house, but the supply turned out to be extremely difficult as there were no food stamps available for the Bernauers. Therefore Albert Meier inaugurated the befriended farmer couple Ludwig and Elisabeth Weeg from Wahlscheid, who supplied the Meiers with milk, meat and bread.

The situation became increasingly critical when Overath's father returned home on leave from the front in November 1944. Since he was considered politically "unreliable", he was under constant surveillance. He stayed with his brother so as not to endanger the Jewish family in his house. Nevertheless, denunciations occurred more frequently towards the end of 1944. That is why Käthe Overath took the Bernauer family in a night-and-fog operation, on a horse-drawn wagon and hidden under tarpaulins, to Ludwig and Elisabeth Weeg in Wahlscheid, where their second daughter Erna Nussbaum found shelter with her husband and they stayed until the end of the war stayed in May 1945. The Bernauers later returned to Troisdorf.

Käthe Overath continued her life in Lomar-Donrath. After 1945 she married the former soldier Heinrich Overath (1916–1990).

Honors

literature

  • Norbert Flörken: Troisdorf under the swastika. A small town in the Rhineland and the National Socialists , Second edition Troisdorf 2009 (Ed. Troisdorf City Archives)
  • Günther Bernd Ginzel: … nobody was allowed to know! . Help for persecuted people in the Rhineland from 1933–1945 - Talks, documents, texts, Pulheim 1995, pp. 127–142.
  • Rudolf Hellmund: ... because they wore the Star of David , in: Troisdorfer Jahreshefte 11 (1981), pp. 69-100.
  • IsraelGutmann / Daniel Fraenkel / Jacob Borut: Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations. Germans and Austrians , Göttingen 2005, pp. 193–194.
  • Gerd Streichardt: Not all were murderers , in: Lohmarer Heimatblätter, issue 22, November 2008, p. 60
  • Nora Weeg / Annette Hirzel, Human rays of light in dark times. The story of the rescue of the Jewish Bernauer family , series of publications by the Förderverein Gedenkstätte Landjuden an der Sieg eV Vol. 4, Siegburg 2014.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Office of the Federal President
personal data
SURNAME Overath, Kathe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Meier, Katharina Maria (full name at birth)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German resistance fighter in the Third Reich
DATE OF BIRTH September 16, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Donrath
DATE OF DEATH November 23, 1995