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Selma Wolff (née Katzenstein) * 1874

Neue Straße 52 (Harburg, Harburg)

HIER WOHNTE
SELMA WOLFF
GEB. KATZENSTEIN
JG. 1874
DEPORTIERT 1942
THERESIENSTADT
1942 TREBLINKA
ERMORDET

further stumbling stones in Neue Straße 52:
Toni Neufeld

Selma Wolff, née Katzenstein, born on 7.5.1874 in Harburg, deported on 19.7.1942 to Theresienstadt, further deported on 21.9.1942 to Treblinka, murdered

Neue Straße 52, Harburg

Selma Katzenstein was born as the daughter of the Jewish produce merchant Jacob Katzenstein and his wife Friederike two years after the end of the Franco-Prussian War. The street Neue Straße, where the young family lived at that time, ran parallel to Schlossstraße (today: Harburger Schlossstraße), which connected the old center of Harburg around the former citadel and the harbor with the new settlements around the sand and showed the direction of further urban development. Here, the steeple of the Dreifaltigkeitskirche, the town's main church, rose into the sky, and here one store lined up after another. Life on the street also reflected the central importance of this important access road to the department store in Harburg Harbor.

It was not far from this residential district to the Harburg synagogue on Eißendorfer Strasse. This place of worship had been built 11 years earlier, after the local Jewish community had slowly grown following the gradual removal of many legal restrictions, but nowhere near as much as the overall population of the city. Harburg's 175 Jews accounted for a total of only 1.3% of the town's total population of 13,179. But they contributed in a considerable way to the economic boom of the town in the second half of the 19th century.

It is unclear when Selma Katzenstein met and then married her husband Siegfried Wolff (* Sept 26, 1873) from a likewise Jewish family. Just as little is known so far about where the young couple moved into their own apartment and what Siegfried Wolff's profession was.

We do not know what effects the gradual exclusion and disenfranchisement of the Jews had in detail on the Wolffs' everyday life; but that the consequences were profound can be seen from the fact that in 1941 they lived in the Lazarus-Gumpel-Stift at Schlachterstraße 47 in Hamburg's Neustadt. This house was one of the many residential foundations that had once been established by wealthy Hamburg Jews for predominantly Jewish fellow citizens with little or no income.

Demand for this special type of housing increased steadily after 1933, when more and more Jewish residents of the city found themselves in financial difficulties, and especially after tenant protection for Jews was abolished in April 1939 and special housing laws were introduced. The "Law on Tenancies with Jews" of April 30, 1939 provided that Jews could only live with Jews and that Jewish landlords could be forced to accept Jewish tenants and subtenants. This law had as by no means unintended side effect - more than two years before the "forced resettlements" in specially designated "Jewish houses", to which then also the Lazarus-Gumpel-Stift belonged in 1942 - a stronger spatial concentration of the Jewish population of Hamburg, which enabled the National Socialist rulers then from 1941 a smoother execution of the deportations.

After the first deportations from Hamburg had already begun, Siegfried Wolff died on November 21, 1941.

Like many other inhabitants of the Lazarus-Gumpel-Stift also Selma Wolff was deported on 19 July 1942 from Hamburg to Theresienstadt. In autumn 1941 the Nazi leadership had begun to develop the former garrison town at the river Eger into a ghetto for Jews from Bohemia and Moravia. Since July 1942, this place was also used as a "retirement ghetto" for German and Austrian Jews, who were promised a carefree retirement here.

In the following weeks and months, one transport after another arrived at this place, where about 7000 people had lived before the Second World War. In September 1942 alone, the number of residents who had to be rehoused increased by 18,693 people. More than 13,000 of these people were further deported to the Nazi extermination camps in the East over the next weeks and months.

Selma Wolff was among the people taken to Treblinka on September 21, 1942. Here, in the spring of 1942, the German occupiers had set up a death factory in a remote wooded area - with a connection to the Warsaw - Bialystok railroad line. Immediately after their arrival, those who disembarked here had to hand in their luggage, undergo a shave of all body hair, and make their way to the gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. The corpses were then thrown into two large pits by inmates of a special commando, which had been specially assigned for this purpose and was strictly shielded.

Selma Wolff was 68 years old when her life was taken.

Her sisters Henny Andrade and Toni Neufeld also did not survive the Holocaust.

Translation by Beate Meyer
Stand: January 2022
© Klaus Möller

Quellen: Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 992b Kultussteuerkartei der Deutsch-Israelitischen Gemeinde Hamburg, 332-5 Standesämter; Helms-Museum, Harburger Adressbücher; Hamburger jüdische Opfer des Nationalsozialismus. Gedenkbuch, Jürgen Sielemann, Paul Flamme (Hrsg.), Hamburg 1995; Theresienstädter Gedenkbuch. Die Opfer der Judentransporte aus Deutschland nach Theresienstadt 1942–1945, Prag 2000; Yad Vashem. The Central Database of Shoa Victims´ Names: www.yadvashem.org; Gedenkbuch. Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933–1945, Bundesarchiv (Hrsg.), Koblenz 2006; Harburger Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Bezirksamt Harburg (Hrsg.), Hamburg 2003; Alfred Gottwald, Diana Schulle, Die "Judendeportationen" aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–1945, Wiesbaden 2005; Matthias Heyl, Vielleicht steht die Synagoge noch. Ein virtuelles Museum zur Geschichte der Harburger Juden, CD-ROM, Hamburg 1999; Wegweiser zu den ehemaligen Stätten jüdischen Lebens oder Leidens in Hamburg, Heft 1, Deutsch-Jüdische Gesellschaft Hamburg (Hrsg.), Hamburg 1983.