Margarethe Sylva Elisabeth Wisniewski (, 31 December 1899 â 15 July 1987), known professionally as Margarete Schlegel, was a German theatre and film actress and soprano operetta singer.
The sixth of seven children and the third of four girls, Margarethe Sylva Elisabeth Schlegel was born at 11:45pm on 31 December 1899 in Bromberg, West Prussia, German Empire, (now Bydgoszcz, Poland) to a German-speaking Prussian-Polish Catholic family. Her father was Augustin Heinrich Schlegel (1865–1934), who legally changed the family surname from Wisniewski upon relocating them to Berlin in 1904, while her mother was Anna Agatha Schlegel (, 1864–1940).
When her husband was dismissed from his professorship at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg (now Technische Universität Berlin) in May 1933 and his academic books and novels written under the pseudonym Hermann Lint were burned by the Nazis, he travelled to Britain to give the Sidney Ball Memorial Lecture at Oxford University and as a visiting professor at King's College, Cambridge at the invitation of the Professor of Economic History, John Clapham. Although Ms Schlegel was offered many opportunities to join her Weimar expatriate film colleagues in Hollywood from the late 1920s onwards, she declined these offers to emigrate to the US. In 1935 she was offered the chance by SS Head Heinrich Himmler to continue her film career under the Third Reich on the condition that as an Aryan she divorced her assimilated Jewish husband (he was baptised as a Lutheran at the age of 14 in 1895 under the oversight of his older sister's husband, the research chemist Prof Arnold Carl Reissert), but instead fled with her son to join her husband in Britain. In consequence, in July 1938 the Nazis officially proscribed her films, which could no longer be shown publicly in Germany or its occupied territories. At about the same time, her husband was added to Hitler's so-called Black Book, the death list of opponents of the Third Reich who would be arrested upon the anticipated Nazi occupation of Britain after Operation Sea Lion. Also in 1938 her husband's former family residence and marital home in Tiergarten, "Villa Kabrun", was seized by the Nazis for use as the foreign embassy of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the putative "world capital", Germania.
After arriving in England, she became a featured soprano on BBC Radio in operas and operettas by Offenbach, Lehar and Horton in the late 1930s. During WW2 she broadcast anti-Nazi German-language propaganda radio programs for BBC Europe which were heard across the Continent. After her husband died suddenly in 1949 from a heart attack, she remarried and moved to Saltdean on the Sussex coast in England. In the 1950s she continued broadcasting for BBC Radio, singing in operettas and recitals such as "The Queen of Song" about the life of Adelina Patti. She also sang and spoke in German language educational radio programs for the BBC from 1938 onwards.
Schlegel died on 15 July 1987 after being very active in local Catholic church affairs for many years.