The divorced dressmaker Hertha Philipp owned a furs store in Berlin-Mitte, which was looted, destroyed, and closed down during the 1938 November pogrom. In 1939 she married the lawyer Berthold Blumenthal, who died in 1941. She had to perform forced labor sewing uniforms from 1942.
At the start of 1943, she was in urgent danger and fled to the home of an acquaintance, the dressmaker Margrit Dobbeck in Berlin-Schöneberg. Blumenthal also asked for help from Elisabeth Abegg, her emigrated daughter’s former teacher. Abegg found a fellow helper, the Berlin art dealer Agneta von Barkow, who took in Hertha Blumenthal for more than six months. In mid-September 1943, Agneta von Barkow was denounced by a neighbor for making statements “subverting the war effort.” Hertha Blumenthal escaped just in time before her arrest. In early October 1943, she traveled in disguise to Mulhouse in Alsace, where Margrit Dobbeck had been living since the summer of 1943. She hid with her and with Josephine Mayer in Soultz-Haut-Rhin until her liberation.
In October 1945, she joined her daughter in Stockholm, going on to work in the restaurant trade.
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
