The Jewish sisters Charlotte and Alice Carlé had to go into hiding at the beginning of March 1943. They found refuge with the commercial college lecturer Elsbeth Raatz in Berlin-Charlottenburg, but had to leave her home one to two weeks later, due to a risk of denunciation by a neighbor. Raatz gave them her passport, however. The sisters then stayed in Berlin-Spandau, in the village-like neighborhood of Kladow, posing as vacationers. They did not inform their landlord that they were Jewish.
After a while, they came into contact with the circle of helpers formed around Franz Kaufmann. The latter helped Charlotte Carlé to alter Elsbeth Raatz’s passport. When the Kaufmann circle was discovered in August 1943, the Carlé sisters were arrested on August 27 in the course of the Gestapo investigation, and deported on September 10, 1943 to Auschwitz, where they were presumably immediately murdered.
Four Stumbling Stones were installed at Beuthstraße 10 in Berlin-Mitte in March 2017, commemorating Alice and Charlotte Carlé and their parents.