Hedwig Klein

According to Albert Dietrich [de], who would later become a professor of Arabic, university teachers at the time were liberal and open-minded people, for whom anti-semitic views were beyond the pale.

[2] She was not initially awarded the PhD because of her Jewish background, so she wrote to the sinologist Fritz Jäger, who was dean of the School of Philosophy, mentioning, among other things, that her father had been killed in the war.

Her PhD supervisor Rudolf Strothmann called her dissertation "a worthy contribution to Islamic Studies", and his colleague Arthur Schaade remarked that Klein's work was "so diligent and brilliant that it made one wish some older Arabists could live up to it.

[6] After consulting with the authorities, Jäger refused to grant the necessary approval to confirm Klein's doctoral degree, claiming that "the situation was deteriorating".

Freimark writes, "When she was in a desperate situation, Hedwig Klein received help and support from a man, whose effective and courageous efforts deserve praise and have not yet been recognized.

On 21 August 1939, she sent Rathjens a postcard from Antwerp on which she wrote: "In this pleasant weather, I'm feeling good on board the ship and I'm not worried about the future at this moment.

In October 1942, he asked his Arabist colleague Adolf Grohmann, who was based in Leitmeritz, to search for the young woman and to hire her as an assistant.

[13] Grohmann did not think "that further work for the named person was any longer an option, if only on the grounds of prestige", as he wrote to Schaade on a postcard that bore the imprint "Heil Hitler".

At the end of 1945, Rathjens told his former neighbor, the theologian Walter Windfuhr, that, "It is 100% certain that the first transport [on which Hedwig Klein was deported] was sent directly to Auschwitz.

According to Freimark, because of Klein's "sheltered lifestyle" she was apparently unable to imagine "the extent and scope of the barbarism" and the existential threat that she faced.

[14] In order to exonerate himself, Hans Wehr claimed in his De-Nazification after 1945 that he had been able to save "Miss Dr Klein from Hamburg" from deportation by recruiting her for "work that was critical to the war effort", i.e. the Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic.

"In an act of remembrance that was uncharacteristic for its time",[4] Carl Rathjens petitioned the Amtsgericht Hamburg in the summer of 1947 to appoint him to be Hedwig Klein's representative in absentia (Abwesenheitspfleger).

[16] On 22 April 2010, Stolpersteine bearing the names of Hedwig Klein and other murdered Jewish academics were placed outside the main buildings of the University of Hamburg.