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Otto Moses Luria, 1938
© StaHH

Otto Luria * 1869

Woldsenweg 7 (Hamburg-Nord, Eppendorf)

HIER WOHNTE
OTTO LURIA
JG. 1869
VERHAFTET 1938
KZ FUHLSBÜTTEL
EINGEWIESEN
HEILANSTALT
LANGENHORN
TOT AN DEN FOLGEN
31.8.1939

Otto Luria, born on 16 Nov. 1869 in Hamburg, died on 31 Aug. 1939 in Hamburg

Woldsenweg 7

On 1 Apr. 1938, 68-year-old Otto Luria was committed to "protective custody” ("Schutzhaft”) in the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp, where he remained until his transfer to the Hamburg-Stadt pretrial detention center on 7 April. He was accused of the "crime” of "unnatural sexual offenses” ("widernatürliche Unzucht”). In accordance with the ruling of the Hamburg Regional Court (Landgericht), at the end of Aug. 1938, he was taken to the Langenhorn State Hospital (Staatskrankenhaus) to examine his "mental state.” Only from the preserved patient’s file, we learn more about his biography as the criminal justice and prisoner records relating to him were destroyed.

Otto Moses Luria was born on 16 Nov. 1869 as the fourth son of Jacob Luria and Angelina, née Pardo. The parents passed away in 1873 and 1874.

The son of Jewish parents, he attended the liberal Wahnschaff School up to passing the exam finishing his one-year graduating class ("Einjähriges”) in 1886, and afterward he completed a three-year commercial apprenticeship in Hamburg. He spent another three years working in Britain, before relocating to the Venezuelan city of Caracas in 1892. In 1897, after a stay in Germany owing to illness, he moved to join his brother in the Central American city of San Salvador, subsequently operating a flourishing department store with him in the interior of the country.

After the beginning of the First World War, he was prevented from returning to Central America during a trip to Germany. He was drafted for duty as a border guard on the Danish frontier. After the war, he worked for his Hamburg nephew Hermann Fränkel in the insurance field until 1934. The assets he had accumulated in South America before, amounting to 200,000 RM (reichsmark), had been used up almost entirely by 1938 due to his support of needy relatives and losses at the stock market. In 1934, Otto Luria suffered from two strokes that forced him to retire.

In 1938, Otto Luria was charged with treating a 20-year-old messenger of a grocery store to a coffee and touching him sexually. After the person in question at first reacted affirmatively, he later reported the initiation of contact to police. Another charge concerned an encounter with a man in the gay bar "Zu den 3 Sternen.”

Upon questioning by the Langenhorn physician A. Georg Saupe, Otto Luria described his sex life in detail: "I have had homosexual tendencies since my early youth, being active on that score particularly in South America; on the side, I also had intercourse with women, though definitely preferring men.” In his concluding expert’s report, Saupe then formulated stereotypes about sexuality that can be found in numerous expert’s reports of this time referring to married homosexual and bisexual men. For instance, he wrote about Otto Luria, "Thus, one cannot regard his abnormal drive as irresistible and pathological … quite consciously and willingly, he therefore abandons himself to desires emerging in each respective case … until now, at the threshold to ripe old age, the avenging nemesis catches up to him.”

The "revenge” of the Nazis landed Luria, suffering from arteriosclerosis, in pretrial detention once again in early Oct. 1938; then, at the end of December, he was sentenced to an unknown penalty for "unnatural sexual offenses” and imprisoned in the Fuhlsbüttel penitentiary. In Aug. 1939, he was transferred to the central prison hospital, and then discharged to the Israelite Hospital at the end of the month. He died there on 31 Aug. 1939, officially of "cancer of the liver.”


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

Stand: March 2017
© Ulf Bollmann

Quellen: StaH, 213-8 Staatsanwaltschaft Oberlandesgericht – Verwaltung, Abl. 2, 451 a E 1, 1 a; 242-1 II Gefängnisverwaltung II, Ablieferung 16; StaH, 352-8/7 Staatskrankenanstalt Langenhorn, Ablieferung 1995/2 Nr. 25180; StaH 332-5 Standesämter, 1104.