Queen’s milliner who fled the Nazis killed in London road accident

Herta Groves, who died on April 27 at 96, left Austria aged 19; her parents and sister perished at the hands of the Nazis

By ToI Staff 7 May 2016, 11:11 am

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Herta Groves, who fled the Nazis in Austria, died on April 27, 2016 at the age of 96 when she was hit by a truck in London (screen capture: USC Shoah Foundation)

A Vienna-born Jewish woman who fled from the Nazis to the UK before becoming a hat maker to Queen Elizabeth II, was killed when she was hit by a truck in central London.

Herta Groves, who died on April 27 at the age of 96, was born to a middle class family in the Austrian capital in 1920, Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported, but left the country for the UK with scarce funds when she was just 19. Prior to her departure, she had used her sizable family home to show other Jewish women how to obtain foreign work permits so that they could leave Austria and escape the Nazis.

Following her departure, Groves’s father died of pneumonia contracted when the Nazis forced him to shovel snow on the streets of Vienna, the Telegraph said. Her mother and younger sister had planned to follow Groves to London, but perished in a concentration camp in Latvia in 1942.

In the British capital, Groves established the London Hat Company, making her own designs into couture head wear. The business was a success, and she opened offices across Europe, even in Germany.

“The British gave us a chance to re-start our lives. We could rebuild everything here,” Groves told the USC Shoah Foundation, an organization created by Steven Spielberg to record the stories of Holocaust survivors. “I didn’t speak about the Holocaust to anyone, when I gave speeches it was mostly about hats.”