The jurist Lothar Kreyssig was an early supporter of the Confessional Church, which brought him into conflict with the Nazi regime. In 1937 he became a judge at the district court in Brandenburg an der Havel, dealing with custodianship matters. When he became aware in 1940 of the systematic murders of people with mental illnesses and disabilities in mental hospitals and institutions, he protested and was put into early retirement. His farming activities on an estate in Hohenferchesar secured the family’s financial existence.
Through contact to Elisabeth Zimmermann, an acquaintance from the Confessional Church, Kreyssig and his wife Johanna took in the “non-Aryan” Christian Edith Behr for several months in 1943, and from November 1944 the endangered Gertrud Prochownik. The latter posed as a domestic servant on the estate under a false name, until the end of the war around six months later.
Kreyssig co-initiated the foundation of the Action Reconciliation group in 1958. Lothar and Johanna Kreyssig were posthumously honored as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem in 2016.