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Paul Jacobsohn * 1887

Peterskampweg 66 Ecke Marienthaler Straße (Hamburg-Mitte, Hamm)

HIER WOHNTE
PAUL JACOBSOHN
JG. 1887
VERHAFTET 1938
1939 FUHLSBÜTTEL
FLUCHT 1940
JUGOSLAWIEN
DEPORTIERT 7.12.1943
AUSCHWITZ
ERMORDET

Paul Jacobsohn, born on 12 Jan. 1887 in Prenzlau, detained in 1938/39 and in 1939/40, deported on 7 Dec. 1943 from Trieste to Auschwitz

Peterskampweg 66/at the corner of Marienthaler Strasse

Paul Jacobsohn came to Hamburg as a textiles merchant after the First World War. On 30 Aug. 1919, he married Margarethe Dorothea Else Ahlers of the same age, born on 8 Nov. 1887 in Hamburg. He was born as the son of the master tanner Naumann Jacobsohn and his wife Mathilde, née Arndt, in Prenzlau in the Uckermark region. Naumann Jacobsohn operated a tannery with about 30 employees, an enterprise that had earned him considerable wealth. Paul grew up with three siblings: the older brother Hugo, born on 4 Apr. 1884, the younger brother Kurt, born on 10 Sept. 1889, and Margarethe, born on 7 Apr. 1892; with the latter, he remained in close contact. Two other siblings had died while still infants.

After completing the eight-grade elementary school (Volksschule) in Prenzlau, Paul Jacobsohn did a commercial apprenticeship specializing in the textiles trade; Margarethe attended the girls’ secondary school, began working in her father’s company, and completed an advanced business school. Naumann Jacobsohn then set up an oriental carpet business for his son Paul in Nuremberg, where Margarethe worked as well. This was associated with an obligation to pay Margarethe a dowry of 30,000 M (marks) in case she got married.

Hugo and Paul Jacobsohn fought in World War I. When Paul was drafted, he gave up the business. Margarethe returned to Prenzlau and to her father’s company. As a frontline soldier, Paul was buried and he sustained a permanent hearing defect, and his brother Hugo was killed in action near Ogorodniki in Russia on 20 Sept. 1915. It is unknown just what led Paul Jacobsohn to go to Hamburg. He moved to Schwarzestrasse 30 in Hamburg-Hamm. The house belonged to the Ahlers family. The owner was the unmarried Margarethe Ahlers. Apart from her, the persons residing there were Wilhelm and Elise Ahlers with their daughter Else, the widow W. Ahlers, and the merchant Walter Ahlers. The family belonged to the Lutheran Church. A master shoemaker, Wilhelm Ahlers had run his own business at Kirchenweg 22 in St. Georg until the First World War, and he lived on his pension since then. When their children were wedded, Wilhelm Ahlers and Naumann Jacobsohn took on their traditional roles of witnesses to the marriage. The young couple initially continued to reside at Schwarzestrasse 30.

On 29 Jan. 1924, Else Jacobsohn gave birth to a daughter, Inge, who remained their only child. In 1925, Paul Jacobsohn was registered for the first time in the German-Israelitic Community as a taxable member with the occupational designation of "agent.” In the Hamburg directory, he was listed as a merchant. He worked as a self-employed businessman and paid an annual contribution of 10 RM (reichsmark) in each of 1925 and 1926 to the Jewish Community, from 1927 until 1929 nothing at all. In 1928, the year of Naumann Jacobsohn’s death, Paul and Else Jacobsohn started a business of their own at Stoeckhardtstrasse 66/68, operating a men’s fashion store and moving there as well. The profits and taxable income were modest. The effects of the world economic crisis and, from 1933 onward, the calls for boycotts, threatened the survival of the enterprise, but in 1936 Paul Jacobsohn paid a small contribution again, and in 1937 the highest sum overall, 14.27 RM.
In 1932, the mother died in Prenzlau. Margarethe had cared for her and managed the household, and in 1936, she went to Hamburg and worked as an employee in her brother’s business.

In order to preserve the company that was ailing due to its Jewish owner and in order not to jeopardize the daughter’s education, the couple formally got divorced at the application of the wife in Dec. 1938, but the divorced spouses stayed in contact. This relationship is reflected in both the Jewish religious tax (Kultussteuer) card file of the Jewish Community and the prisoner card, where Paul Jacobsohn was considered married. Else Ahlers retained sole custody of their daughter. The parents had done what they could to conceal Inge’s Jewish descent. Inge was baptized in the church in Hamburg-Hamm in 1938 and just as her mother, she was not listed in the Jewish Community, enabling Else Ahlers to substantiate having raised her daughter in the Christian tradition. Paul relinquished his custody, pretended to make plans for emigration and never having exerted any influence over his daughter. He assumed responsibility for the failure of the marriage by admitting to an extramarital relationship with a woman "of German blood” in Lübeck. Else Jacobsohn re-assumed her last name Ahlers and continued to operate the linen and men’s fashion store as Else Ahlers.

On 1 Apr. 1940, Inge Ahlers started a three-year apprenticeship as a sales assistant. In order to sign the training contract, her uncle Walter Ahlers was appointed guardian by the District Court (Amtsgericht); but she also joined the DAF, the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront).

Paul Jacobsohn was charged with "racial defilement” ("Rassenschande”). The proceedings against him began with his committal to the Fuhlsbüttel pretrial detention center on 2 Nov. 1938, from where he was transported as a prisoner awaiting trial to the Marstall prison in Lübeck three weeks later, on 24 Nov. 1938. The Lübeck Regional Court (Landgericht) sentenced him to two years in prison on 6 Jan. 1939. To serve his sentence, he was transferred back to Hamburg on 14 Jan. 1939 and committed to the Fuhlsbüttel penitentiary. In calculating the pretrial detention lasting 30 days against his sentence, the end of imprisonment was set for 9 Nov. 1940, 7.30 a.m. The prisoner card reveals that he was a man 1.71 m (approx. 5 ft 7 in) in height, had brown eyes and gray hair, a pointed nose and an oval-shaped face.

On 8 Nov. 1940, Paul Jacobsohn was released from prison into the custody of the police authorities and on 19 December to freedom, though only on condition that he leave the German Reich within six days. For a few days, the Jewish Community quartered him in its homeless shelter at Westerstrasse 27. Supported by the Community, he fled to Yugoslavia, crossing the border illegally on 24 Dec. 1940. The entry on his tax card on 3 Jan. 1941 notes his "retirement to Yugoslavia.”

Until 1943, Paul Jacobsohn regularly sent a message to his wife and their daughter, the last one from Brod na Kupi at the beginning of September. He joined partisans and was captured by German troops in Slovenia in early November. A former comrade living in Zagreb reported to his sister Margarethe in 1947 about this fate. Based on this letter, in the restitution proceedings the Restitution Office (Amt für Wiedergutmachung) assumed in 1954 that he had been killed as a partisan.
Else Ahlers had continued to run the business until its destruction in the firestorm of July 1943. Afterward, she rebuilt it as a store and residential quarters at Hansastrasse 58. When she passed away in 1949, she did not know anything about the fate of her husband, who was not actually killed as a partisan but deported from Trieste to Auschwitz on 7 Dec. 1943 and murdered there.

When the originally joint business was transferred to Else Ahlers, Margarethe Jacobsohn had left the company as well. She entered service as a housekeeper until she was enlisted for compulsory labor duty in 1940 to do work in a home for evacuated persons at Rothenbaumchaussee 217, where she also resided.
There, she received the order for "resettlement to the East” ("Aussiedlung in den Osten”) on 6 Dec. 1941. The transport was destined for Riga. Although already 49 years old at the time of her deportation, she survived the Kaiserwald concentration camp and was used for work in the area just ahead of the advancing Red Army in Thorn in July 1944. There, during labor duty in the snow and the cold temperatures in Jan. 1945, she lost four toes through frostbite, which were amputated in the hospital in Bromberg. This was followed by an operation on the leg, which meant she experienced the end of the war there. In Oct. 1945, she returned to Hamburg.

In Paul Jacobsohn’s birthplace of Prenzlau, a Stolperstein at Neubrandenburger Strasse 7a commemorates him.


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

Stand: April 2018
© Hildegard Thevs

Quellen: 1; 4; 5; 8 (dort Name des Vaters falsch); Hamburger Adressbücher; VVN Totenbuch 1968; StaH 232-5 Vormundschaftswesen, 836; 242-1 II, Abl. 13 und Abl. 16; 242-II, 17770 – Fotoarchiv 741-4, A 256; 332-5, 1160-14/1942; 3349-761/1919; 351-11, 9899; 522-1, 390; Stadtarchiv Prenzlau, Geburtsregister 1889, dank freundlicher Mitteilung von Dr. Eckhard Blohm; "Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes – Bund der Antifaschisten e.V. (VVN-BdA), Landesvereinigung Hamburg, Aktenbestand des Komitees ehemaliger politischer Gefangener", Komitee-Akte Inge Jacobsohn; http://www.prenzlau.eu/cms/detail.php/land_bb_boa_01.c.370837.de
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