Magdalena Römer (21.4.1888 Utting – 14.9.1969 Munich)

The daughter of a Catholic teacher, she attended a girls' high school in Frauenchiemsee and studied at the Munich Academy of Music. She then lived in Paris until 1914. In 1920 she married Georg Römer, a graduate engineer. With their daughter, born in 1926, they enjoyed a comfortable life in Munich until the Depression. In 1930, Magdalena Römer joined the International Bible Students Association (which in 1931 became the Jehovah's Witnesses). She remained active even after it was banned, for example providing financial support to Jehovah's Witnesses whose husbands were in concentration camps or had been executed. However, it was not possible to prove her illegal activities until 1941, when incriminating letters written by her were found in Frankfurt am Main. This was followed by a search of her home, during which Bible Students' writings were discovered which, according to the Gestapo , contained “in large part very harsh attacks against the state and the party” (StAM StAnW 11253). In 1942, Magdalena Römer was sentenced to fifteen months in prison by the Munich Special Court. Her husband was able to obtain temporary releases for her, which she again used to distribute illegally produced Jehovah's Witness pamphlets. Because she refused to provide information to the Gestapo, she was taken into solitary confinement in 1943. She was only released at the end of the war in 1945 after more than two and a half years in prison. In 1947, she testified in a court case against the former Gestapo officer Grimm, who had also brutally attacked other Jehovah's Witnesses.