Dr. Gertrude Luckner: Catholic and Righteous among the Nations

Fragile and courageous

Dr. Gerturde Luckner, who consecrated her life to saving Jews in Nazi Germany, paid for her actions with two years of imprisonment in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Last summer, Dr. Gertrude Luckner, who risked her life during the Shoah to help Jews, passed away. For many years she worked to strengthen understanding and collaboration between Jews and Christians in general and between Germany and Israel in particular. She was born in 1900, in Liverpool, England, to a German couple  but she was handed over to a German couple named Luckner who lived in the town of Hursam in south east England shortly after her birth. When she was 22 years old they formally adopted her.

Luckner lived moved with her foster parents to Germany. The First World War delayed the conclusion of her schooling and she received her matriculation certificate at the age of 25. She enrolled in academic studies in political economy. Luckner completed her doctorate in 1938 but the certificate was only given to her after the Second World War. The examiners refused to give her the certificate in 1938 because the subject of her doctorate - "Self help among the unemployed in England and Wales" - put her under suspicion of not being loyal to the Nazi regime and having socialist tendencies.

Two years before finishing her doctorate, Luckner began working for the "Free Association for Mental Relief" of the Catholic humanitarian organization Caritas in Freiburg. The "Free Association for Mental Relief" of Caritas was the cover name for an organization that offered counseling and services to those who were persecuted by the Nazis. In this job she made contact with many Jews. She made it her task to furnish them with food or visitor or emigration permits with the intention of saving them from the Nazis.

When the Second World War broke out, Caritas founded the "Office for Church Relief in War" and she was transferred there. The task of the office was to trace missing persons and give aid relief to prisoners of war and those detained, but Luckner's heart was taken captive by the Jews, who had been deprived of all their civil rights. The Archbishop of Freiburg understood her and in 1941 he put her in charge of carrying out "essential tasks for special mental aid". Luckner wove a web of projects all over Germany and made contact with the Jewish communities throughout the country.

Her main contact was with Dr. Rabbi Leo Baeck, the chairman of the Association of Jewish Communities in Germany. Baeck provided her with a coded password that opened the doors of the heads of the communities before her. She took it upon herself to provide for the essential needs of the Jews when it came to education, food and health.

Her frequent visits to the Jewish communities did not escape the attention of the Gestapo which ordered that she be followed. In the Gestapo headquarters in Dusseldorf much material was gathered about her activities and on March 24, 1943 she was arrested and transferred to the Gestapo detention holding in Dusseldorf.

Luckner was interrogated by the Gestapo for a number of months but, despite the torture that she was put through, she did not tell about her activity in favor of the Jews but only spoke about the matters that were connected to her official mission from the Archbishop and Caritas. The Gestapo interrogators decided to transfer her to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. She was liberated by the Red Army on May 3, 1945 when it conquered the camp.

After her liberation, she set herself the goal of working for the rapprochement of Jews and Christians. The question of what had enabled the event of the Shoah in the heart of enlightened Europe haunted her. She continually brought it up on every occasion.

In a conference of German bishops that took place at Magenta in 1948, Luckner raised a proposal for a decision that called to adopt the recommendations that had been made within the framework of Caritas, the aim being to deepen understanding between Christianity and Judaism. The decision was accepted and with it Luckner succeeded in publishing a journal, "Freiburger Rundbrief" (the Freiberger Circular) which soon become a respected theological yearbook that focused on the problems between Judaism and Christianity and the understanding of the commitment of the latter to the former. The yearbook was published until 1987 all the while her energies held out and it was renewed in 1994 now as a quarterly.

In the years after the Shoah, Luckner again and again bore witness to her solidarity with the state of Israel. When the Yom Kippur War broke out, she immediately flew to Israel. After the battles waned, she initiated the establishment of the physiotherapeutic pavilion in the rehabilitation home for wounded soldiers on the Carmel.

She found time to take on another humanitarian problem: the fate of Christian women who had aided Jews to survive under Nazi rule and had married them contrary to the Nuremberg Laws. Quite a few of these women had converted to Judaism after the Shoah and immigrated to Israel with their spouses. When their husbands died, these women remained alone and lacking sufficient means. Luckner raised the means  to establish a protected residence for these needy women.

Luckner was honored frequently in Israel for her activity in favor of Jews. She was among the first Germans invited to visit Israel. Yad VaShem bestowed on her the title of Righteous among the Nations and honored her with the planting of a tree in the Avenue of the Righteous among the Nations. The Jewish National Fund planted as forest in her honor.

One can ask from where did this fragile woman with innocent eyes derive the force to stand up against the power of the Nazis and to consecrate her life to solidarity with the persecuted Jews and the State of Israel? My forty years of friendship with her allow me to propose an answer: it seems to me that the strength of Dr. Luckner derived from her deep Christian faith and her willingness to faithfully walk behind the Crucified One and take upon herself his suffering.