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Edgar Levin * 1895

Spaldingstraße 82 (Hamburg-Mitte, Hammerbrook)

HIER WOHNTE
EDGAR LEVIN
JG. 1895
VERHAFTET 1938
UNTERSUCHUNGSGEFÄNGNIS
HAMBURG-STADT
1939 SACHSENHAUSEN
ERMORDET 24.11.1939

Edgar Levin, born 01/231/1895 in Flensburg, perished at Sachsenhausen concentration camp on 11/24/1939

last residence: Spaldingstrasse 82

Edgar Levin was a son of the Jewish couple Leopold Levin-Moses and his wife Anna, née. Lehmann (born 1856). The parents, who had already died in the late 1920s, had seven daughters and three sons, born between 1884 and 1898. The daughters Erna (born 1885), Lilly (born 1888), Vally (born 1889), Marga (born 1890), Hertha (born 1893) and Lola (born 1896) were all married to non-Jewish partners; Luise (born 1898) had died young and unmarried in 1920.

It is known that two daughters fell victim to the Holocaust. Lilly (also spelled Lilli) was first married to the Jew Julius Mayer, who was killed in WWI in 1918; later she married Wilhelm Schuhmacher, who was not Jewish; she was divorced from him and again taken the name of her first she was deported. She worked as a clerk and lived at Auenstrasse 5a in the Eilbek section of Hamburg until her deportation to Riga. A Stumbling Stone has been laid for her at her latest residence. The other Levin sister murdered by the Nazis was Lola, who had married a non-Jewish man named Hartkäse; the couple ran a bakery in Hamburger Strasse in Wandsbek. In 1943, she was first deported to Theresienstadt, and then in May, 1944 to Auschwitz, where her trace is lost.

The fate of the other sisters, who were married to non-Jewish men, is not known. It is also not known whether Edgar’s brothers Hermann (born 1884), der who moved to Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland), and Leonhard (born 1892) fell victim to the Nazi persecution; it may be assumed that they survived.

Edgar Levin began his professional career as an auctioneer in 1925. Failing to achieve success in this business, he was obviously inveigled not to duly deliver auction proceeds entrusted to him in that year, spending them for his own needs instead. In 1928, the Hamburg court of appeals in its final decision sentenced him to a fine of 600 RM. At the time, he was living in a childless marriage to Dora, widowed Lange, née Schröder, who was not Jewish. It is not known when the union ended in divorce. It seems that Edgar Levin did not recover from his professional setbacks; in 1938, the Jewish Community, to which he had not paid culture taxes since 1923, noted on his tax card that he was unemployed. At the beginning of August, 1939, he moved from his apartment in Sierichstrasse to Königstrasse 31/35; there, however, he only stayed for eleven days, before moving to Spaldingstrasse 82 on August 12th, where he registered as a sub-tenant with "Fräulein Frieda Schliecker.”

On November 22nd, he was admitted to the Hamburg City remand prison on account of suspected "racial defilement.” After five months of remand, he was transferred first to the jail in Hamburg-Harburg and then, on June 2nd, 1939, to the Glasmoor penitentiary north of Hamburg; it is not known whether there had been a trial. On July 30th, 1939, he was transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was given the prisoner’s number 002369 and admitted to prison block 11. He did not even survive the barbarous conditions of confinement for four months and died on November 24th, 1939.


Translated by Peter Hubschmid
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: March 2017
© Benedikt Behrens

Quellen: 1; 4; StaH, 213-11, Staatsanwaltschaft Landgericht – Strafsachen, A 03365/33, StaH 242-1II, Abl. 13+16, Untersuchungshaftanstalt Hamburg-Stadt (Gefangenenkarten), Schriftliche Mitteilung der Gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen v. 25.9.2007.
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