Hedwig Porschütz was officially employed by Otto Weidt in his warehouse from 1940. She helped Weidt’s to protect Jews and hid the twins Marianne and Anneliese Bernstein in her Berlin attic apartment from January to the summer of 1943. In March 1943 she also took in Grete Dinger and her niece Lucie Ballhorn. Since Hedwig Porschütz let sex workers use her apartment, it was occasionally visited by clients. The Jewish women had to leave the apartment at these times.
When a Jewish couple were arrested in her building in the Mitte district in the summer of 1943, the women left their hiding place. Hedwig Porschütz continued to provide them with food, and housed Grete Dinger and Lucie Ballhorn temporarily with her mother in Berlin-Schöneberg. Hedwig Porschütz was sentenced to 18 months in a penal institution for “black-marketeering,” which also helped feed the women she hid. She served her sentence from October 1944 until the end of the war.
In 1959 the West Berlin senate refused to honor Porschütz as an Unsung Heroine, due to her previous sex work. She was honored posthumously as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem in 2015.