Saving Jews was her passion:

...Originally this meant helping Jews who had converted to Catholicism, since welfare was traditionally administered through religious institutions in Germany...

...She identified and associated with Germans who opposed the Nazis and played a central role in the effort to persuade the Catholic church to speak out on behalf of Jews...

...Two further social circumstances aggravated Sommer's mental state...

...Catholics, Sommer noticed, suffered from this callousness as much as Protestants...

...Caring for them stressed Sommer to the utmost...

...Sommer aided as many as she could, but the only real hope for the Jews, she knew, was in forcing the Nazis to stop their killing...

...After this Sommer and Preysing worked intently to get Pope Pius XII and the German bishops to condemn Nazi atrocities...

...Sommer did not expect Germans-at-large to take responsibility for the Holocaust, but she did expect them to take responsibility for its survivors...

...Because Hitler had persecuted Jews indiscriminantly, a solidarity had arisen during the Holocaust among Berlin Jews regardless of religious preference...

...She had every right to be proud of her record, but she was not...

...In Holocaust history there are no happy endings...

...Before Sommer became aware of the Holocaust, her work was limited to converts or part-Jewish, part-Catholic families...

...How could Germans forget, Sommer wondered, the awful persecution of the Jews...

...Her attitude toward two rescuers later recognized by Israel as "righteous gentiles," Pastor Heinrich Griiber and Gertrud Luck-ner, offers a glimpse of Sommer's emotional anguish during the postwar years...

...She was engaged in resistance, but in her mind she was working for her country, not against it...

...Few non-Jewish Germans felt the pain and suffering of the Jews as much as Sommer...

...Through the office, Sommer had assisted hundreds and hundreds of Jews over more than a dozen years...

...She lived in a national culture that had not been friendly to the women's movement...

...If she thought this way about Griiber and Luckner, it is not difficult to imagine how she thought of most Germans...

...I believe that psychologically these were the most tranquil years of her professional life...

...Sommer nevertheless withdrew into herself, scrupulously reviewing her rescue work and asking whether she might have saved others...

...During the later years of the thirties, Sommer's efforts on behalf of employed women became untenable and her career as a woman's advocate ended...

...and of Rudolf Hertwig whose Jewish father died in a concentration camp and whose Christian mother "pays no attention to him...

...Although Israel has not yet recognized Sommer as a Righteous Gentile, the German government eventually honored her with a Cross of Merit for her work for Jews during the Holocaust...

...Thus, the postwar years were a bleak time for Sommer...

...The torment of the Jews became her own...

...By all rights Sommer should have been relieved of the latter burden, but she awoke to her own cold, gray dawn...

...She was all too familiar with the familial tragedies wrought by Nazi racism...

...Sommer knew about the 1941 Kovno massacre in Lithuania within three months of its occurrence...

...But the possibility existed at the time that this might change...

...Sommer's reaction to Nazi racism extended beyond genetically ill Catholics...

...I will try to explain this paradox...

...Sommer gathered second-hand information about genocide from all over Germany and even more convincing reports from a "leak" within the Ministry of the Interior in Berlin...

...There was not enough food to maintain the general population at a subsistence level...

...Although her work became more diversified after 1954, Sommer's experiences during the Nazi years tormented her for the rest of her life...

...The general public, she noted, simply did not accept the fact that the survivors "deserved any consideration at all...

...Sommer was entrusted with this assignment...

...Konrad Preysing, the forward-looking bishop of Berlin, hired Sommer in 1935 to work for the diocese as a specialist in women's affairs...

...it was thought that Cardinal Bertram would not live much longer (in fact, he died as the war ended...

...Material want dispirited everyone...

...Which survivors were most deserving...

...She referred to the years of Nazi rule as the "unlawful time...

...Thus, for six years, including the bitter Holocaust years of 1942-45, Sommer worked for the Berlin church to save Jews and with her bishop to save all the Jews of Europe...

...The number of converts who, like Edith Stein, had perished during the Holocaust numbered in the many thousands...

...This also extended, as we saw, to Sommer who assisted or hid Jews whether converts or not...

...For this reason the Holocaust years were a time of great purposefulness for her...

...And, since Nazi racist welfare affected women so directly, Sommer became involved in preventing the Nazis from killing genetically handicapped Catholics...

...There were about 190,000 Jews in Berlin, of whom about 40,000 had converted to Christianity...

...Both Griiber and Luckner had rescued Jews during the Holocaust and, like Sommer, both of them gave themselves over completely to the task of relief for survivors...

...sist Jews...

...Sommer found it continually "astonishing" that "no one can understand why anything needs to be done on behalf of these people [survivors...

...At the end of World War II, as historian Gordon Craig has written, Germany awoke to a cold, gray dawn...

...Given housing...

...Margarete Sommer would have answered in the same way for two reasons: it was her responsibility to file official death notices for converted Jews who did not survive, and it fell to her to help those Jews returning to Berlin to put their lives back together...

...Who should be employed...

...Thus, in the prime of life Sommer experienced her first personal setback at the hands of the Nazis, and her career as a single, professional woman seemed doomed...

...Physically, Germans had to dig themselves out of the rubble...

...For her, Hitler and the Nazis were not Germany...

...Sommer quarreled with Christian as well as Jewish caregivers...

...She would have been snubbed and shunned...

...It was at the moment of liberation that the survivor realized that there was nothing to survive for-neither family nor home...

...In 1954 the Special Relief Office of the Berlin diocese, in which Sommer had worked since 1939 and directed since 1941, was closed...

...After Lichtenberg died in custody of the Nazis, Bishop Preysing appointed Sommer head of the diocesan Office of Special Relief, whose title gave no hint of its mission...

...Because euthanasia violated church teaching so blatantly, the German bishops could not compromise with the Nazis as they heretofore had become accustomed to doing...

...When they failed to do so, she wrote off her countrymen for being "small of heart...

...When, ultimately, it became clear that transportation actually meant death for Jews, Sommer hid Jews and organized Catholics to support Jews in their hour of greatest desperation...

...Preysing pressed Pius repeatedly, writing him thirteen times in fifteen months during the critical years of the Holocaust...

...Under these circumstances it was impossible for Sommer to speak out...

...Had she vented her feelings openly, she would have been accused of self-serving adulation and of promoting herself at the expense of her fellow countrymen...

...With Eva Fleischer, he is coauthoring a book on Catholic women who helped Jews during the Holocaust...

...The destruction of their homes, their ghettoization, and their outright murder...

...This meant finding and placing personnel in Berlin's Catholic hospitals and homes who could be relied upon to hide endangered people, adults as well as children, from Nazi doctors-hide them physically or hide the records that disclosed their genetic condition...

...Second, she lived in a religious culture that deprived women of authority...

...Since in reality Sommer had deep respect for both Griiber and Luckner, her bitter denunciations must be understood in terms of her postwar emotional distress...

...Finding herself walled in by these factors, Sommer could not bring herself to speak out against her church or country, faulting them for their failure to confront Hitler over the Holocaust...

...Fortunately, she was able to find her niche as a liberal, woman's advocate-what we would call today a moderate feminist-within the Catholic church...

...Survivors of the Holocaust often surprise interviewers who ask what was the most dreadful aspect of their ordeal by answering, "When it was over...

...In 1946 Sommer estimated that of the approximately twenty thousand German Jewish survivors, thirteen thousand resided in Berlin...

...After the national attack on Jews in November 1938, Bernhard Lichtenberg, a priest of Saint Hedwig's Church in Berlin, began daily public prayers for Jews after Mass...

...She died in 1965 at the age of seventy-two...

...Sommer knew of hundreds of cases of broken lives or broken families and this weighed down her spirit...

...At war with the "outlaw" Hitler regime, she was at peace with herself...

...This meant getting visas for them, finding jobs for women whose non-Jewish husbands had been drafted, giving financial support to indigent elderly Jewish converts or to families, and helping the sick...

...Fortified with these, she made frequent railroad trips from Berlin to Breslau where she tried to convince the dean of German bishops, Cardinal Adolph Bertram, that Hitler was murdering Europe's Jews...

...But the end was also a beginning...

...News about atrocities against Jews filtered back to Germany...

...Between July and October 1941, over 18,000 Jews, including over 5,000 children, were forced to walk from the city of Kovno to pits located about three miles outside the city, where they were shot...

...The committee for the victims of fascism had to deal with these questions, and when they did so in a manner that Sommer felt was incorrect, she became angry and irritable...

...As a result there was no one with whom Sommer could commiserate or even discuss the prevailing lack of empathy in Germany for survivors...

...At this point the web of Nazi racism began to entangle Sommer, and from 1938 on she toiled on behalf of German Jews...

...The next year when the German death camps were built in Poland, SS officer Kurt Gerstein visited Berlin revealing the awful details of a murder at Belzec where 700 or 800 Jews had had to await death for nearly two hours while mechanics worked to repair the diesel engine that had broken down while pumping its exhaust into the chamber in which they stood, pressed body-to-body against one another...

...Over the course of just five years, Sommer had run afoul the Nazis twice, and both times she found her professional life stymied...

...Bertram, who preferred to avoid conflict with Hitler, eventually wearied of Sommer...

...This painful first-hand awareness of human love torn apart was amplified by equally tragic cases of human weakness...

...Foreign relief agencies, not understanding that to Hitler and the Nazis it did not matter whether a Jew had converted to Christianity, wanted their supplies to be distributed only among Mosaic Jews...

...But as the Nazis' anti-Semitic policy became more and more inhumane and systematic, it meant helping all Jews...

...Sometime in 1939 she crossed the line separating dissent from the Nazis to resistance...

...But more than the material problems, it was the attitude of other caregivers and of noncaring people that stretched Sommer's nerves to the breaking point...

...In 1936, the Nazi welfare administration ended services for the genetically handicapped and, a few years later, decided on a policy of killing them to preserve the purity of the German race...

...Even in its moderate Protestant and Catholic forms, the Nazis opposed feminism...

...Thus, while most Germans put the Holocaust behind them as soon as they possibly could, Sommer continued to deal with it directly...

...Sommer, as I discovered in the church archives of Berlin, was about to become active in resisting the Nazis...

...In the end, of course, neither the German bishops nor the pope spoke out forcefully and unambiguously against the murder of the Jews...

...Unable to blame others, Margarete Sommer, who had done more for Jews during the Holocaust than most Germans, blamed herself for not having done more...

...Relief agencies were overwhelmed...

...There was the case of Peter Grunberg, born in 1933, who was abandoned by his "Aryan" mother after she divorced his Jewish father who became a Holocaust victim...

...Sommer nevertheless referred in 1946 to Griiber as a dictator and disparaged Luckner's efforts in considerable detail to a mutual friend...

...The Catholic protest against euthanasia suggested that a similar protest might save Jews...

...How should monetary relief be divided among survivors...

...When this interconfessional solidarity broke down after the war, bitterness tainted Sommer's work...

...Sommer worked for the Prussian state welfare office as a university lecturer, but was released in 1934 "under severe political pressure" by the new Nazi regime...

...Those who had not perished were just as much in need of support as other survivors of the Holocaust...

...Spiritually, they had to deal with guilt relating to what was immediately recognized as the most gruesome genocide in human history...

...Unmarried all her life, Sommer was a professional woman who had taken a doctorate in social work from the University of Berlin in 1927...

...Lichtenberg's defiance of nazism and subsequent arrest inspired Sommer and others to form a resistance group whose purpose it was to asMICHAEL PHAYER is professor of history at Marquette University in Milwaukee...

...They promoted motherhood and pronatal-ist programs and objected to the kind of professional, economically engaged women Sommer ministered to...

...At least Sommer and Bishop Preysing thought so...