Search for Names, Places and Biographies

Elias Edwin Weiss
© Yad Vashem

Elias Edwin Weiss * 1882

Münzplatz 11 (Hamburg-Mitte, Hammerbrook)

HIER WOHNTE
ELIAS EDWIN WEISS
JG. 1882
EINGEWIESEN 1941
HEILANSTALT BENDORF-SAYN
DEPORTIERT 1942
IZBICA
ERMORDET IN
BELZEC

Elias Edwin Weiss, b. 8.5.1882 in Hamburg, probably murdered in 1942 in the Belzec extermination camp (Poland)

Last address: Münzplatz 11

Elias E. Weiss was the son of Rabbi Heinrich Weiss and his wife Caroline. Until his "severe nervous breakdown,” he worked as a salesman for the Jewish leather and animal hide export business Bachrach & Loeb at the Port of Hamburg. His first marriage was with Elsbeth, née Gross, until her death in 1930; he had from this marriage a son Karl-Heinz (b. 1926). In 1931 he married Maria Adele, née Sachs, the daughter of the AEG-Director in Buenos Aires; her first marriage to a man named Thorn ended in divorce in 1928. From this marriage came a son Wolfgang (b. 1924). After the committal of her husband Elias Weiss in the Langenhorn psychiatric hospital, his second wife had their marriage annulled in November 1938 but received the guardianship for her stepson, Karl-Heinz, for whom she apparently felt responsible. The custody for her own son, Wolfgang, which had been awarded after her divorce, was in 1936, on the application of her divorced husband, withdrawn by the Lörrach District Court on grounds that she was "a half-Jewess” and had been married to a "Full Jew” (although of Catholic confession): "even if she made strenuous efforts, she would not be in position to bring up her son in in a National Socialist manner.” The retention of custody by the mother would therefore "be fully in conflict with National Socialist principles and German National sensibilities.” Her stepson Karl-Heinz was able to emigrate with a Children’s Transport to Great Britain in November 1938. After the war, he travel to be with his stepmother, who had emigrated to the USA in 1939.

Elias Weiss was transferred on 21 April 1941 from the Langenhorn Institute to the Bendorf-Sayn Psychiatric Hospital near Koblenz, in which Jewish patients were concentrated and segregated. From there he was transported in March 1942 to the Izbica transit camp and in the same year from there to the Belzec extermination camp, where all final traces of him were lost.


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

Stand: May 2019
© Benedikt Behrens

Quellen: 1; 4; 5; AfW, Entschädigungsakte.
Zur Nummerierung häufig genutzter Quellen siehe Link "Recherche und Quellen".