Gertrud Luckner (1900-1995)
Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand archives
Written by: Dr. Carol Rittner, RSM
It seems almost a cliché to call Gertrude Luckner extraordinary, but that is what she was
– extraordinary. When most ordinary people in Nazi-dominated Germany were turning
their backs on their Jewish neighbors and colleagues, Gertrud Luckner was looking for
ways to help them. When most ordinary Germans closed their eyes not to notice that Jews
were being forced out of Nazi Germany, Gertrud Luckner was looking for ways to
connect them with her contacts in England and elsewhere so they might find a place of
refuge. When so many ordinary citizens in Nazi Germany refused to extend a helping
hand to infirm and elderly Jews who had no one to look after them, Gertrud Luckner
conspired with her friend Rabbi Leo Baeck in Berlin to visit them and to bring them food
and medicine to them so they would not feel alone and abandoned. And when the Nazis
began to arrest and deport the Jews of Germany to concentration camps in Poland,
Gertrud Luckner, a slightly built, intelligent, and fearless woman, risked her life to help
hide and save Jewish men, women and children.
Who was this woman who refused to be daunted by the Nazis and the Holocaust?
Who was this Catholic woman who refused to be infected with the theological anti-
Judaism coursing through her religious tradition and the racist antisemtism animating her
society? And who was this German woman of courage who after 1945 refused to give in
to the physical and psychological aftereffects she endured following years of Nazi
harassment, torment, and imprisonment during World War II and the Holocaust?
Gertrud Luckner was born to German parents in Liverpool, England on
September 26, 1900. They returned to Germany when Gertrud was six years old. Her
parents, still quite young, died after World War I. She had no brothers or sisters and once
said, “my family was a small part of my life.” 1 The war, however, was not a small part of
her life. It impacted her greatly, and while she missed out on some regular schooling
because of the war, she developed an early and abiding interest in social welfare and in
international solidarity. “I was always against war,” she said, and “so I got involved with
a very international group. I received my degree from Frankfurt am Main in 1920, in the
political science department.” 2 She went on to study economics, with a specialization in
social welfare, in Birmingham, England (at the Quaker college for religious and social
work). She returned to Germany in 1931, shocked by the popular support Hitler and the
Nazis had, “appalled at the Nazi vocabulary of women students in Freiburg.” 3 She
obtained her doctorate from the University of Freiburg in 1938, just as Hitler and the
Nazis were consolidating their power, stepping up their harassment and persecution of
Jews in Germany, and preparing for all-out war in Europe.
A trained social worker, Luckner worked with the German Catholic Caritas
organization in Freiburg. She was active in the German Resistance to Nazism and was
also a member of the banned German Catholic Peace Movement (Friedensbund
deutscher Katholiken). When it became increasingly difficult for Jews in Germany, she
travelled throughout the country, giving assistance to Jewish families wherever and
whenever she could.
2
Even before the Nazis came to power in Germany (1933) and before World War
II and the Holocaust, Gertrud Luckner already was ecumenical in mind and spirit. She
had been raised as a Quaker, but she became a Catholic after hearing and being impressed
by the Italian Catholic priest and politician Father Luigi Sturzo (1871-1959) “in a packed
hall at the University of Birmingham in 1927.” 4 For her, religion was about compassion,
reaching out, from one person to another, a favorite method of hers “with which she
worked magic.” 5 What mattered to her were human beings and their well being. Her
political views, influenced by her Quaker upbringing and her Catholic social justice
views, contributed to her early identification of Hitler’s political and international
danger. 6
After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, she organized within the Caritas
organization, with the blessing and active support of Freiburg’s Catholic Archbishop
Conrad Gröber, a special “Office for Religious War Relief ” (Kirchliche
Kriegshilfsstelle). Although the record of the institutional Christian Churches – Catholic
and Protestant alike – in Germany during the Nazi era and the Holocaust is less than
exemplary, there were individual church people – clergy and laity alike – who did try to
help people who were being persecuted by the Nazis. And while Archbishop Gröber was
not what one would call an outstanding anti-Nazi resistor, neither was he a rabid
supporter of Hitler and the Nazis. As the war wore on, the Office for War Relief became
in effect the instrument of the Freiburg Catholics for helping racially persecuted “non-
Aryans,” which included both Jews and Christians. While Gertrud Luckner was the
driving force behind this relief effort, She used monies she received from the archbishop
to help Jews, to smuggle them over the Swiss border to safety, and to pass messages from
the beleaguered German Jewish community to the outside world.
Luckner often worked with Rabbi Leo Baeck, the leader of the Reich Union of
Jews in Germany (Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland), to help the Jews. She
remained in close contact with him until his arrest and deportation to Theresienstadt in
early 1943. Then, on November 5, 1943, as she was on her way by train to Berlin to
transfer 5000 Marks to the last remaining Jews in that city, Luckner was arrested by the
Gestapo. For nine weeks, she was mercilessly interrogated by the Gestapo, but she never
revealed anything. She was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp where she endured
nineteen harrowing months until she and thousands of other women were liberated by the
Soviet army on May 3, 1945.
Asked why “she did what she did, thereby risking her life” to help Jews and
others who were in danger during the Nazi era, World War II, and the Holocaust, she
always replied, “almost astonished,” that it “was obvious.” What did she mean, it was
“obvious”? Asked if it was “religious conviction” that prompted her to do what she did,
she admitted, with one word, “Probably.” 7
After the war, Gertrud Luckner established a center for Catholic-Jewish
reconciliation in Freiburg, although the mood in the country in the 1950s did not support
such work, nor did the Vatican, but
Having risked her life for Jews and spent the last two years of the war in
Ravenbrück concentration camp, Luckner found it impossible to abandon the
remnant of Jewish humanity that survived the Holocaust. Already forty-five years
old at the war’s end and in poor physical condition, the irrepressible Luckner
decided to dedicate herself anew to fighting German antisemitism and promoting
3
Christian-Jewish reconciliation. Luckner knew it would be a long-term process,
simply because it meant confronting German and Christian anti-Semitism. 8
Luckner established the Freiburg circle, a German dialogue group devoted to
conciliatory work with Jews, as well as a journal, the Freiburger Roundbrief which
because of Luckner’s personal credibility attracted Jewish readers and correspondents of
international reputation. Her friend, Rabbi Leo Baeck survived the war and the
Holocaust. He never forgot that Gertrud Luckner was risking her life to give Jewish
people relief when she was arrested by the Gestapo. After the war, he supported her, and
at his invitation, she visited Israel in 1951, one of the first Germans to do so. It was the
first of several visits to Israel, where there is now a home for the aged named in her honor
Dr. Gertrud Luckner devoted herself to the work of Christian-Jewish
reconciliation. In no small part, it was her persevering work as a Catholic Christian that
helped nudge the Church to begin to come to terms with its long and shameful history of
theological anti-Judaism. While there were others – clergy and lay, women and men –
who also helped the Catholic Church to re-think its religious and practical relationship
with living Jews and Judaism, few were more dedicated to this task than was Gertrud
Luckner. She made an enormous and positive difference to many, many people. On
February 15, 1966, Yad Vashem recognized Gertrud Luckner as Righteous Among the
Nations.
Block, Gay and Malka Drucker. Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust.
New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1992: 146-148.
Petuchowski, Elizabeth. “Gertrud Luckner: Resistance and Assistance. A German
Woman Who Defied Nazis and Aided Jews” in Ministers of Compassion During the Nazi
Period. South Orange, NJ: The Institute of Jewish-Christian Studies, 1999: 5-21.
Phayer, Michael. The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2000.
Phayer, Michael and Eva Fleischner, Cries in the Night: Women Who Challenged the
Holocaust. Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1997.
Notes
1 “Gertrud Luckner” in Gay Block and Malka Drucker, Rescuers: Portraits of Moral
Courage in the Holocaust (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1992) 146.
2 Ibid.
3 Elizabeth Petuchowski, “Gertrud Luckner: Resistance and Assistance. A German
Woman Who Defied Nazis and Aided Jews” in Ministers of Compassion During the Nazi
Period. South Orange, NJ: The Institute of Jewish-Christian Studies, 1999: 7.
4 Ibid, 8.
5 Ibid, 9.
6 Ibid. 8.
7 Ibid, 9.
8 Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965 (Bloomington, IN:
Milena Jesenska & Margarete Buber-Neumann