Hedwig von Rittberg

Countess Hedwig von Rittberg (1839 to 1896) was a Prussian-German nurse, hospital supervisor and founder of the Auxiliary Sisters Association. Born in Liegnitz in Silesia, the youngest of eleven children of a Prussian major, she was refused by her father when she wished to become a deaconess and nursed sick relatives instead. In the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 she took a nursing course in Breslau and served the wounded, earning the Order of Louise. In 1870 Queen Augusta asked her to become superior of the new Augusta Hospital in Berlin, where she cared for German and French wounded in the Franco-Prussian War and received several decorations. In 1873 she passed a pharmaceutical exam, and on 1 October 1875 she and two other sisters founded the Auxiliary Sisters Association in Berlin to provide well-trained nurses for home care regardless of class or denomination. She died in Nowawes, now Potsdam-Babelsberg, in 1896. The association later took her name and joined the German Red Cross of Berlin in 1975.