Biographical/Historical Information
Cora Berliner was born in Hanover, Germany in 1890, the fifth and last child of Manfred Berliner – director at a local commercial school [Handelsschule] - and his wife Hanna Berliner. Cora Berliner studied mathematics, political economy, and law in Berlin and Heidelberg, earning her doctorate in 1916 and then taking a position as department head in the city administration of Berlin-Schöneberg. She worked for many of the highest governmental departments during the Weimar Republic, including Reichswirtschaftsministerium and Reichswirtschaftsamt, and she also was an advisor in the economic department of the German Embassy in London since 1927. In 1930, she became a professor of economics at the Technical College (Berufspädagogisches Institut) in Berlin. With most other German Jews, she was dismissed from the civil service in 1933.
In 1933, Cora Berliner started working for the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (Reich Representation of German Jews), founded in September 1933, later the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Representation of Jews in Germany). She was the head of the department of statistics and responsible for economic and social questions. During these years she wrote reports about the economic vicissitudes of German Jews after the Nazi rise to power, highlighting the especially difficult situation of Jewish women in her reports. She became active in “Jüdischer Frauenbund” (Jewish Women´s Association) as vice-president from 1934 on. Together with her friend Hannah Karminski, she was in charge of assisting women and children with emigration matters. On June 19, 1942, Cora Berliner and other members of the “Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland” were deported to Minsk, Belarus and murdered, presumably in Maly Trostinec.
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Citation
Cora Berliner : seated at a desk, circa 1925?, Leo Baeck Institute, F 2060.