Margarete (Marga) Meusel


Originally from Upper Silesia, Marga Meusel worked in different fields of Christian social welfare in in the regional church of the Old Prussian Union. In 1932, she assumed the management of the Inner Mission’s Evangelical District Welfare Agency in the Burckhardthaus in Berlin-Zehlendorf.


Meusel rejected Nazi racial ideology from the very start. Actively aiding Christians of Jewish descent from 1933 onward, she repeatedly called for the establishment of a central church aid agency for Christian non-Aryans. Nonetheless, a memorandum she authored was not brought up for discussion at the National Synod of the Confessing Church in Augsburg in 1935. When deportations began in 1941, Meusel helped victims of persecution with lodging, food and identity papers. In 1943, she was denounced for anti-Nazi statements but the woman who had denounced her recanted. After the war’s end, Meusel resumed her work in Berlin. She was deeply disappointed by the church’s course in the postwar period. Physically and mentally exhausted, she attempted to find other work but to no avail.


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