A campaign has been launched to recognise a British woman who risked her life to save her Jewish friend from the Nazis during the Second World War.

Cambridge University academic Gilly Carr has called on Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem-based Holocaust memorial group, to recognise the actions of Dorothea Weber and name her a Righteous Among the Nations.

Dorothea hid her friend Hedwig Bercu from German soldiers on Nazi-occupied Jersey for 18 months.

According to a BBC report, Hedwig, 24 at the time, had attempted to fake her own death to escape Nazi capture by leaving a suicide note and piled of clothes on a beach.

However, the Germans – who occupied the Channel Islands from June 1940 until May 1945 and required Jews to register with authorities – saw through the ruse and warned islanders that they would be “liable to punishment” if they were caught hiding her.

Dr Carr said: “If Dorothea had been caught, it is likely that she would have been sent to a concentration camp – as would Hedwig.”

She added: "'It is quite possible that Dorothea could have been outcast by friends and family. In 1941 she married Anton Weber, an Austrian baker who was forcibly drafted into the German army.

"Dorothea could have been seen as a 'jerry bag', the derogatory name for women who consorted with German soldiers.

"Her reputation would not have been helped by the occasional presence at her house of Kurt Ruemmele, a German soldier who was sweet on Hedwig Bercu, and who smuggled food to the two women after Hedwig went into hiding."

After the war Hedwig, who died in 2009, followed Kurt Ruemmle to the UK where he was being held in a prisoner of war camp. They later married and raised a family in Germany.

Her daughter Marion Oberer-Ruemmele said her mother never spoke about what happened in Jersey.

"It's an amazing story; sometimes it makes me angry that she never spoke to us about it.

"It was absolutely incredible what both of my parents went through, they were so brave."

Dr Carr is now researching what happened to Dorothea after she was convicted of bigamy in 1949, when, believing her Austrian husband had died in the war, she married British soldier Francis Flanagan.

In 1942, three Jewish women from Guernsey were deported to France and later interned at Auschwitz, where they all died in the gas chambers.

Albert Bedane is so far the only Channel Islander to receive the Righteous Among Nations honour, which he was awarded for sheltering Jewish woman Mary Richardson.