Biography

Honored as a "Righteous Among the Nations", by Yad Vashem, in 1979. When her Jewish friend Lilli Schiff received "resettlement orders" from the Nazis, Dorothea Neff crafted a fake suicide note, left at Liil's residence, and had Lilli live with her.

Born at 9:15pm-CET

Dorothea Neff was Austrian actress.

After training in Munich, Dorothea Neff's stage career took her to Regensburg and Aachen, playing roles as a young heroine and lover, then as a character actress at the Munich State Theatre and then via Cologne and Gera to the German People's Theatre in Vienna in 1939.

From 1941 to 1945, Dorothea Neff hid her Jewish friend Lilli Wolff, who was threatened with deportation, in her apartment in Annagasse in Vienna's first district, thus endangering not only her theater career but also her own life. She was supported in this by the then young doctor and later psychiatrist Erwin Ringel, who cared for Lilli Wolff when she was ill. On September 2, 1944, all theaters in Vienna were closed, and Dorothea Neff was assigned to a factory in Wurmsergasse that produced uniforms and shirts for soldiers. She looked after Lilli Wolff the entire time, bribing the caretaker and staying with Wolff in the apartment even when air raid sirens sounded. After the war, Lilli Wolff emigrated to the USA, where she settled in Dallas.