Originally from Alsace, Margrit Dobbeck was a self-employed dressmaker in Berlin. A devout Catholic, she rejected the Nazi regime.
From the beginning of 1943, she took several Jewish Berliners into her home. She trusted her neighbor Philipp Schmitt to help her. From June 1943, the two of them also protected the Jewish couple Gertrud and Emil Stargardter, who had obtained their address from the Quaker Elisabeth Abegg.
After a denunciation, Margrit Dobbeck moved to Mulhouse in Alsace in the summer of 1943. Between August and November 1943, four persecuted Jews followed her there, and received protection from Dobbeck and her relatives and acquaintances. She maintained contact to the circle of helpers formed around Elisabeth Abegg in Berlin, and also took in eleven-year-old Susanne Manasse and her foster mother Liselotte Pereles temporarily in Mulhouse. They later returned to the Berlin area. Four of the people Dobbeck protected were liberated by U.S. troops in Alsace in November 1944.
The Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem honored Margrit Dobbeck posthumously as Righteous Among the Nations in 2013.
Margrit Dobbeck (left) with Emil and Gertrud Stargardter, Mülhausen, around 1944. Source: Privatbesitz/Private
Gertrud and Emil Stargardter (No. 2 and 3) with their rescuer Margrit Dobbeck (6) and two other persecuted Jews, presumably Flora Wolff and Hertha Blumenthal (4 and 7), Mulhouse, around 1944. Source: Privatbesitz/Private
