Hedwig Porschütz

Hedwig Porschütz, born in 1900, officially started a job as a stockroom worker at Otto Weidt’s workshop in 1940. She was involved in Weidt’s aid activities and hid the twins Marianne and Anneliese Bernstein in her apartment in Berlin from January until the summer of 1943. In March 1943 she also took in Grete Dinger and her niece, Lucie Ballhorn. Hedwig Porschütz let prostitutes use her apartment. When their clients visited, the people in hiding had to leave the apartment.

In the summer of 1943, a Jewish couple hidden in the same building was discovered, and the people whom Hedwig Porschütz had been hiding had to leave her apartment. Hedwig Porschütz continued getting food supplies for them, and sometimes hid Grete Dinger and her niece at her mother’s place in the Schöneberg district.

Hedwig Porschütz was sentenced to 18 months in a penitentiary for “hoarding foodstuffs.” She served her sentence in Zillerthal-Erdmannsdorf labor camp from October 1944 until the end of the war.

In 1959 the Berlin Senate Administration for Interior Affairs rejected the status of “Unsung Heroine” for Hedwig Porschütz on the grounds that she had allegedly worked as a prostitute.