Greta Rapp Collection

Greta Rapp lived in Marburg, Germany in the early twentieth century and immigrated to the United States, eventually settling in Flushing, New York.

Greta Rapp discovered the story of Marie Louise Hensel née Flothmann (1894-1942) through Prof. John Dickinson’s book “German and Jew” The Life and Death of Siegmund Stein. According to Dickinson, Marie Louise Hensel was a Christian married to Albert Hensel, a lawyer and Christian descendant of Moses Mendelssohn. She helped Jewish friends in Marburg as living conditions worsened for them during the 1930s and early 1940s. While on a visit to a spa near Lake Constance in 1942, she met the Jewish lawyer Hermann Reis, his wife Selma, and daughter Marion, and decided to coordinate an attempt to allow them to escape to Switzerland over Lake Constance on a fishing boat. Another acquaintance at the spa betrayed the plan to the Gestapo, and Marie Louise Hensel and the Reis family were arrested. Hermann, Selma, and Marion Reis were deported to Auschwitz, where they perished. Marie Louise Hensel hanged herself in her prison cell for fear of divulging information under interrogation that would endanger others. Accounts of her story suggest that she was particularly worried about her two sons, Martin and Kurt, whom the Nazi regime would consider non-Aryan. Kurt Hensel later became a German ambassador to Israel.

Having lived in Marburg herself during the Nazi era, Greta Rapp undertook efforts to have Marie Louise Hensel recognized by Yad Vashem as a righteous gentile although her rescue effort was ultimately unsuccessful. In 1972, Yad Vashem awarded Marie Louise Hensel a medal of honor, and a tree was planted in her name on the Avenue of the Righteous on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem.