Hannah Karminski was born on April 24, 1897, in Berlin and grew up on Oranienburger Straße near the New Synagogue. After training as a kindergarten teacher and social worker in Berlin and Hamburg, she initially worked at a girls’ club in Frankfurt am Main. There she met the women’s rights activist Bertha Pappenheim, through whom she came to the Jewish Women’s Association## and to Berlin.
Here she became involved in the Blätter des Jüdischen Frauenbundes für Frauenarbeit und Frauenbewegung (Journal of the Jewish Women’s Association for Women’s Work and the Women’s Movement) and took over the leadership of the Jewish Women’s Association in 1933. When Jewish organizations were banned in 1938, she became active in the Reich Representation of German Jews and, together with Cora Berliner, helped Jews to leave the country. Together with her partner Paula Fürst, she also organized the rescue of Jewish children to England.
In November 1942, she was arrested by the Gestapo (secret police of the Nazi regime), deported to Auschwitz, and murdered there.
Today, a Stolperstein in front of her apartment building in Berlin Mitte commemorates her.
Sources/Literature:
- Manfred Berger: Hannah Karminski. Der jüdischen Tradition verpflichtet. In: Berlin Aktuell. 2000/Nr. 66, pp. 18–19.
- Marion A. Kaplan: Die jüdische Frauenbewegung in Deutschland. Organisation und Ziele des Jüdischen Frauenbundes 1904–1938. Hamburg 1981, pp. 148–150.
- Gudrun Maierhof: ‚Ich bleibe, um meine Pflicht zu tun‘. Hannah Karminski (1897–1942). In: Sabine Hering (Hrsg.): Jüdische Wohlfahrt im Spiegel von Biographien. Frankfurt/Main 2006, pp. 220–228Natalie Naimark-Goldberg: Biographien jüdischer Frauen: Hannah Karminski (1897–1943) – Jewish Feminist Leader and Social Worker. In: Medaon. Bd. 18 (2024), Heft 35, URL: https://www.medaon.de/pdf/medaon_35_naimark-goldberg.pdf