Emma Trostler

Born in 1884, Emma Trostler managed the building at Großbeerenstraße 92 in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg in the 1930s and 1940s, and ran a laundry there. Otto Weidt met her in 1936, if not before, when he opened his Workshop for the Blind in the basement.

After the Workshop for the Blind moved to Rosenthaler Straße 39, around 1940 a Jewish family, the Horns, moved into the basement apartment at Großbeerenstraße. The father and son worked for Otto Weidt. When the Horns went into hiding at the beginning of 1943, Weidt arranged for Karl Deibel to take over the basement apartment. In the following years Deibel hid victims of political and racial persecution there.

Emma Trostler helped by allowing this illegal activity in the building she managed. She also supported Weidt and Deibel by providing daily necessities for the people in hiding. There was a secret passage between Emma Trostler’s laundry and Karl Deibel’s basement apartment. She used Otto Weidt’s brooms and brushes to barter for food, cooked for the people in hiding, and employed some of them illegally in her laundry.

Emma Trostler died in 1949 in Berlin.