Johanna Oblöser joined the Caritas Socialis convent in Vienna as Sister Norberta in 1923. From 1939 to 1947 she headed the Catholic Women’s Association House in Berlin-Charlottenburg, where around 250 women and 50 female students from the affiliated Women’s Social School lived. During the war, Sister Norberta took in two Jewish women in hiding, one under the cover name of Hitzer, and Lizzi Buttermilch alias “Luise Bartog.” Both women worked in the kitchen.
The situation became particularly dangerous when Buttermilch’s sister Eva Rosenfeld committed suicide in her hiding place in Leipzig early in 1944, and the Gestapo found evidence on her leading to the association house. Lizzi Buttermilch was quickly placed elsewhere temporarily and the Leipzig Gestapo were unable to trace her.
After working in Berlin, Sister Norberta ran the boarding school of the Women’s Social School in Vienna and then cared for refugees and expellees in Dachau near Munich from 1952 to 1979. She returned to her convent in Vienna in 1984. She was honored posthumously as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem in 2013.