The department head Hedwig Preuß married the Jewish businessman Harry Sussmann in Berlin in 1924. After 1933 her husband was imprisoned in a concentration camp for a time. In the fall of 1940, he received a tax card from his non-Jewish friend Walter Bluth, which enabled him to work under the latter’s name for the address publisher Klett for around two years. Bluth also supported Hedwig and Harry Sussmann with food.
Although Hedwig Sussmann was in a “mixed marriage” and her husband was persecuted as a Jew, she repeatedly helped Alice Löwenthal (later Nickel) when she was in hiding in 1943 and 1944. Alice Löwenthal’s calendar, in which she noted where she slept in 1943/44, often contains the entry “Hete,” referring to Hedwig Sussmann.
Probably from February 1945, the Sussmanns lived in Karl Georg Berendt’s weekend house in Heiligensee, a district on the northern edge of Berlin. Berendt—a former schoolfriend of Harry Sussmann’s, whom he met by chance one day—offered him the small house as accommodation, since they would be safer from air raids there. Harry and Hedwig Sussmann stayed in Heiligensee until June 1945.