Otti Moebus Endowment Fund for Excellence

The Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Peace Studies is pleased to announce its first endowment fund. The Otti Moebus Fund for Excellence was established in June 2001 to enable young scholars to study and analyze the causes of the Holocaust, as well as other episodes of genocide. The first allotment of funds will be available by 2004, when the Center for HGPS celebrates its 10th anniversary.

The endowment fund was established in memory of HGPS Director Viktoria Hertling’s mother, Otti Moebus (1906-1972), to honor her courageous behavior in Germany during the mid-1930s. It was then, when emigration was still possible, that Otti Moebus made a risky trip to Arosa, Switzerland, to help Jewish friends escape Nazi persecution. Ostensibly, she was on a skiing trip. But her real purpose was to deposit her friends’ money into Swiss banks. At the time, Arosa was a vacation stop for the “rich and famous.” Carefully avoiding the attention of Nazi border guards, suspicious Swiss police, and bank officials, the elegantly attired Otti organized her “ski holiday” at Arosa’s most exclusive five-star hotel. From there she could make the deposits at nearby banks. These cash reserves later helped her Jewish friends escape to Argentina and Colombia.

Word must have gotten out about Moebus’ activities in Arosa: she was denounced by an anonymous German for having helped her Jewish friends. On her wedding day in August 1935 — one month before the infamous Nuremberg Laws were promulgated—someone smeared “Judenhure Moebus” (“Jewish whore Moebus”) outside her house.

Otti Moebus and her family survived the war. In the 1950s, many of her Jewish friends, then living in Colombia and Argentina, reunited with her in Cologne to express their gratitude and renew their friendships.