Margarete (Grete) Borgmann, a member of the Catholic Center Party, was opposed to the National Socialists from the outset. She lived in Freiburg with her husband Karl, who was called up as a soldier at the beginning of 1942, and their four children. When a friend of theirs, a Jewish woman in a “mixed marriage,” Irmgard Gießler, went underground in November 1944, Grete Borgmann took her “half-Jewish” daughter Ursula to the nearby Stegen monastery. The rector there was her friend Father Heinrich Middendorf.
Through the Camillian priest Hubert Reinartz, Borgmann was able to place Lotte Paepcke, another Jewish woman in a “mixed marriage,” in the St. Vinzentius Hospital. The center of Freiburg was badly damaged by an Allied air raid on November 27, 1944, which also hit the hospital. Paepcke escaped through a basement window. Grete Borgmann asked Father Middendorf for help. He had Lotte Paepcke and her son Peter brought to the monastery the next day. After the air raid, Borgmann also moved to Stegen for safety with her children, and shared a room with Lotte Paepcke. They remained in the monastery until the arrival of French troops on April 23, 1945.