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Ludwig Oehrlein * 1902

Freiligrathstraße Ecke Lübecker Straße (Hamburg-Nord, Hohenfelde)

Verhaftet 1939
KZ Neuengamme
ermordet 03.05.1945
MS Cap Arcona
(inzwischen überholte
Inschrift des Stolpersteins)

Ludwig Oehrlein, b. 5.3.1902 in Würzburg, d. 8.27.1942 in the Dachau concentration camp

Lübecker Straße/corner of Freiligrathstraße (formerly, Freiligrathstraße 5)

Ludwig Oehrlein was born the son of Adam Oehrlein and his wife Dorothea, née Keller, and was baptized a Catholic. After finishing public school, he completed a three-year commercial apprenticeship and then worked as a traveling salesman in the confectionary field. From 1924 to 1925, he became independent with a wholesale tobacco business, but was sentenced to a year and six months in jail for embezzlement of goods on commission. After serving his sentence, he worked as an independent magazine sales promoter. Nevertheless, on account of further crimes, Ludwig Oehrlein was no blank page to the police: between 1921 and 1935, he was convicted a total of eighteen times, on grounds of fraud, embezzlement, theft, and breach of contract.

In 1935, according to later statements to the police, he had sex with a man for the first time, someone he had come to know at a homosexual meeting place at the Millerntor (St. Pauli). He gave this person RM 10 at that time because he was allegedly in need. Without realizing it, the man turned out to be the male prostitute and blackmailer, Alfred Schwammberger (b. 1914). Because he had taken this man home with him to Fruchtallee 124 in Eimsbüttel, he was in the following period importuned for further payments, initially without success.

A short time later, Alfred Schwammberger’s room-mate turned up at Ludwig Oehrlein’s door, Kurt Pohlitz (b. 1910, d 3.29.1944 in the Neuengamme concentration camp), who also made his living as a male prostitute and blackmailer. Pohlitz, who a year later was sentenced to three years in prison because of a hold up in the Hamburg New City, doggedly and violently extorted payments between five and twenty Reichsmarks, a total of approximately RM 100. Ludwig Oehrlein hoped that the payments would keep his homosexuality from becoming known by the neighbors and the police.

In the summer of 1937, at the Café Dreyer (formerly Bieber-Café) in the main railroad station, Ludwig Oehrlein got to know a Hans Witten (b. 1912, d. 1942 in the Bremen Psychiatric Clinic). He got him a place to live and a job at the Iwan Hellweger’s book and magazine stand at Mönckebergstrasse 3, as a sales promoter. After they slept with one another one time, Ludwig Oehrlein received several threatening blackmail letters through which Witten wanted to extort payments up to RM 600. The biography of Ludwig Oehrlein is a sad example of male homosexuals who, under National Socialism, were exposed to intensified extortion and denunciation and who thereby fell into a downward social spiral.

To escape the nosey neighbors, he moved first to Brennerstrasse 9, then in December 1937 to his own flat at Freiligrathstrasse 5. He hoped to be able to entertain men their undisturbed. He fell into the clutches of the Nazi persecution apparatus for the first time in February 1938. A building inspector acquaintance, from whom he had borrowed money to pay his blackmailers and then had difficult paying back, denounced him to the 24th Criminal Police Commissariat for "homosexual crimes” and as a "serious homosexual” with "perverse inclinations.” Moreover, in August 1938, the criminal police found letters from him in the apartment of Hans Witten, whom they were investigating as a blackmailer. Prior to 1938, Ludwig Oehrlein was not known to the authorities as a homosexual. A warrant for his arrest was issued. Only in the spring of 1939, were the criminal police able to locate him, after a brief flight to Denmark and rural Schleswig-Holstein. After intensive interrogation and investigation, he confessed to brief sexual experiences. From blackmail victim, he had become a perpetrator.

On 25 May 1939, he was put into pretrial detention at Holstenglacis and was, on 4 September 1939, condemned for violations of §175 in three instances, by the Hamburg District Court, Section 124, sitting as lay judges, to six months in prison. The judgment was mitigated by the extenuating circumstances that Ludwig Oehrlein had gone only with male prostitutes and that he had never been previously convicted of "unnatural acts.” Along with another conviction in the Soltau District Court on another matter, he was sentenced to one year in prison. He served the sentence in the men’s prison at Fuhlsbüttel.

During his imprisonment, he was sentenced in March 1940 by the Hamburg District Court to two years in prison on account of fraud and the falsification of documents. Since 2 May, he was again in pretrial detention and was then, on 8 November 1940, transferred to the Bremen-Osleben prison. His petitions for pardon during this time were disregarded.

After having served his full sentence on 8 May 1942, he was nevertheless not freed, but rather sent to the inner-city police prison in Hamburg, hut no. 40. Most probably, he was sent from there directly to the Neuengamme concentration camp. The Criminal Police had earlier requested that the court take into consideration his previous convictions on §175. Among the few surviving documents held in the Neuengamme concentration camp, his name appears for the first time on a list for transport to Dachau concentration camp, where he arrived on 1 August 1942 and had to wear prisoner number 32,828. As grounds for imprisonment were noted "professional criminal” ("BV”) and "police preventive detention.” A few days after his incarceration, on 27 August 1942, he died in the camp, aged 40 years.

The last freely chosen address for Ludwig Oehrlein, an apartment on the third floor at Freiligrathstrasse 5, was destroyed in World War II. Where the street issues into Lübecker Strasse, a commemorative stone today recalls his destiny. At the time of the installation of the commemorative stone, the record of deaths of the Neuengamme concentration camp listed his death aboard the ship "Cap Arcona” as 3 May 1945. The corrected date in the meantime now stands on the stone.


Translator: Richard Levy
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: December 2019
© Bernhard Rosenkranz (†)/Ulf Bollmann

Quellen: StaH, 213-11 Staatsanwaltschaft Landgericht – Strafsachen, 7828/36, 10157/36, 3846/39, 6866/39 u. 6229/40; 242-1 II Gefängnisverwaltung II, Ablieferung 13 u. 22869; Dank an Dr. Reimer Möller, KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengammen, für eine Auskunft vom November 2008 mit Bezug auf den Nachlass Hans Schwarz und die Datenbank der KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau; B. Rosenkranz/U. Bollmann/G. Lorenz: Homosexuellen-Verfolgung in Hamburg 1919–1969. Verlag Lambda Edition, Hamburg 2009, S. 241.