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Kurt Speyer * 1880

Lange Reihe 108 (Hamburg-Mitte, St. Georg)

Auschwitz
ermordet 09.06.1943

further stumbling stones in Lange Reihe 108:
Alfred Hochfeld, Julie Hochfeld, Isidor Rothfels

Kurt Speyer, born on 16 Sept. 1880 in Berlin, murdered in Auschwitz on 9 June 1943

last residential address: Lange Reihe 108

Kurt Speyer had been living in Hamburg since 1919 at the latest, initially working as commercial clerk. Later, he started a business of his own as a merchant, operating an agency and wholesale company (in the field of vulcanization supplies) in his private residence at Lange Reihe 108. Since 1925, he was married in his second marital union to the non-Jewish woman Helena, widowed name Götz, née Wiegel (born in 1889), and from the first marriage, he had three children (Kurt, Gertrud, and Charlotte), who were born in Hamburg between 1919 and 1924.

In 1939, Kurt Speyer was banned from working as an independent merchant and compelled, at the age of nearly 60, to perform forced labor as an excavator. In order to evade this physical heavy labor, unfamiliar to him, he filed an official application in early 1940 for permission to become an "agent for Aryan” companies, which was turned down, however. In June 1940, he nevertheless illegally resumed his self-employment by carrying out purchases and sales of packaging materials for foods and for the chemical industry, all the while keeping his compulsory Jewish first name a secret.

After his pursuit of gainful employment became known to the authorities, he was arrested in Mar. 1941 and tried. In Sept. 1941, he was sentenced to one year in a penitentiary for "an infraction of the Ordinance Against Support for the Camouflaging of Jewish Commercial Enterprises [Verordnung gegen die Unterstützung der Tarnung jüdischer Gewerbebetriebe]” (concealing the compulsory first name of "Israel”) and in a second judgment dating from December of that year for sales tax evasion (incomplete disclosure of company sales in the tax return) to three months in prison. After he had served his 15-month sentence in the Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel penitentiary by early June 1942, Kurt Speyer was enlisted for forced labor as a packer at the Rasch & Jung shoe wholesale company in Hamburg in connection with the "Jewish labor deployment” (Judeneinsatz), which he had to perform until late January of that year. On 23 Jan. 1943, the Gestapo committed him as a "protective custody prisoner” ("Schutzhaftgefangener”) to the Fuhlsbüttel police prison, only to be deported from there to Auschwitz on 18 March of that year, where he was murdered three months later. For Kurt Speyer, a Stolperstein is located at the level of his last residential building.


Translator: Erwin Fink
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: January 2019
© Benedikt Behrens

Quellen: 1; StaH 331-1 II – Polizeibehörde II, Abl. 15 v. 18.9.1984, Bd. 3; AfW, Entschädigungsakte; E-Mail vom Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau v. 5.8.2005; AB 1938-43; VAN (Hg.), Totenliste Hamburger Widerstandskämpfer und Verfolgter, Hamburg 1968.
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