After studying medicine, Georg Groscurth worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry, where he met the physicist Robert Havemann. He later became a senior doctor at Robert Koch Hospital in Berlin-Moabit. In March 1943 Walter Caro, a Jewish former patient, visited his consulting room and offered him forged papers. The doctor passed them on to other Jews living underground.
On July 15, 1943, Groscurth, Havemann, Paul Rentsch, and Herbert Richter founded the European Union resistance group. Around that time, Georg Groscurth and his wife Anneliese took in a Jewish woman from Frankfurt, Elisabeth von Scheven, for several weeks in their apartment in Berlin-Charlottenburg. When the European Union was broken up, the Groscurths were arrested on September 5, 1943. Anneliese was released several weeks later; Georg Groscurth, Rentsch, Havemann, and Richter were sentenced to death by the “People’s Court” and beheaded in Brandenburg-Görden penal institution on May 8, 1944.
In 2005 Georg and Anneliese Groscurth were honored posthumously as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem.
Georg Groscurth’s engagement to Anneliese Plumpe, 1939. Source: Privatbesitz/Private
Georg Groscurth and Robert Havemann in their lab, around 1940. Source: Robert Havemann Gesellschaft, Archiv Nachlass Havemann
European Union leaflet: “To all EU employees,” 1943. Source: Bundesarchiv, R 3018/NJ 1720
Georg Groscurth’s ashes are buried in the Heerstraße cemetery; front right: Anneliese Groscurth, Berlin, 1950. Source: Privatbesitz/Private
