Margarete Berent

As a Jew, she suffered from persecution during the Nazi Regime and fled via Switzerland, Italy, and Chile to the United States, where she finally arrived in 1940.

[1] Afterwards she started to prepared to take the Abitur enabling her to study at a German university, while working as a teacher at her former school in Berlin at the same time.

Although women were admitted to study and obtain a doctorate in Prussia, which Berlin was then part of, they were not allowed to pass the bar and work as lawyers.

World War I helped her career in the sense that many of her male colleagues were drafted and women could step into new, now free positions.

[2][6] On the 7 April 1933, the Nazi government released a new law that prohibited Jewish lawyers to work as such (Gesetz über die Zulassung zur Rechtsanwaltschaft).

Although having engaged in voluntary work and for benevolent causes already before, Margarete Berent now had to shift her professional activities a lot since she lost her law firm.

Before 1933, she had mostly engaged in feminist, secular organizations - with the beginning of Nazi Gleichschaltung politics in 1933, many of those started to dissolve in order to avoid being controlled.

With her keen interest in women's rights and legal expertise, she was of great importance for Jewish organizations.

[6] In 1939, when persecution of Jewish citizens became worse in Nazi Germany, Margarete Berent decided to flee.