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Wally Reiner (née Grünfeldt) * 1907

Kentzlerdamm /Ecke Pröbenweg (Hamburg-Mitte, Hamm)

HIER WOHNTE
WALLY REINER
GEB. GRÜNFELDT
JG. 1907
FLUCHT 1933 FRANKREICH
INTERNIERT DRANCY
DEPORTIERT 1942
ERMORDET IN
AUSCHWITZ

further stumbling stones in Kentzlerdamm /Ecke Pröbenweg:
Dr. Max Reiner

Vally Reiner, née Grünfeldt, born on 10 Jan. 1907 in Rostock, in 1933 exile in France, on 21 July 1942, interned in the Drancy transit camp, deported on 24 July 1942 to Auschwitz

Dr. Max Reiner, born on 20 Feb. 1899 in Radymno/Poland, in 1933 exile in France, on 21 July 1942 interned in the Drancy transit camp, deported on 24 July 1942 to Auschwitz

Intersection of Kentzlerdamm/Pröbenweg (formerly: Kentzlersweg)

Vally Reiner came from a Jewish merchant family based in Mecklenburg. She was born as Walli Johanna Grünfeldt on 10 Jan. 1907 in Rostock in her parents’ home at Kröpelinerstrasse 5. She remained the only child of Benno Grünfeldt and his wife Berta, née Radtke. According to Walli’s birth certificate, both were of the "Mosaic” [i.e., Jewish] faith. They had married in Britain in 1905.

Berta’s parents, the traveling salesman Gustav Radtke, and his wife Alwine, née Swede, belonged to the Lutheran Church. Berta Reiner, born on 11 May 1881 in Schwerin, had converted to Judaism in 1906. For Walli, her affiliation to Judaism never seems to have been in question.

Benno Grünfeldt, born on 26 Nov. 1875, came from a respected Schwerin-based family. His father, Abraham/Adolph, had achieved prosperity in the wholesale trade with skins and hides and maintained business relations with Britain as a wool merchant, which his oldest son, Benno, continued, while his younger brother, Emil, born on 2 Mar. 1877, became an engineer. The mother, Friederike Grünfeldt, born around 1848, came from Parchim in Mecklenburg, where her father Salomon Jaffé was a merchant.

On 4 July 1905, Benno Grünfeldt married Berta Radtke at the Tendring registry office in Essex, and the Imperial German Vice-Consul zu Harwich certified her signatures. They returned to Schwerin, but then moved to Rostock, where they started their own textile business – men’s fashion and linen trousseau – in the city center at Lange Strasse 35. Today a leather and fur shop is located there (in 2018).

Benno and Berta Grünfeldt managed the business together. Despite all the adversities caused by war and inflation, the Grünfeldts were successful businesspersons who concentrated on the trade in trousseaux. They established themselves in an upper middle-class life. In addition to the business, they owned apartment buildings in Schwerin. After the death of Abraham/Adolph Grünfeldt, his widow Friederike moved to Berlin, where she died on 11 June 1919.

Alwine Radtke, Walli’s maternal grandmother, continued to reside in Schwerin after the death of her husband Gustav, but at the end of her life, she came to live with her daughter Berta in Rostock, where she passed away on 6 May 1927. At that time, Walli was residing in Hamburg. She had attended the girls’ high school (Lyceum) in Rostock and had passed the high-school graduating exam (Abitur) there in 1925 or 1926.

Growing up in a milieu where everything revolved around textiles, Walli Grünfeldt first completed an apprenticeship as a tailor in Hamburg. After passing the assistant’s examination with a very good result, she worked as a milliner.

On 16 Oct. 1929, Walli Grünfeldt married Max Reiner, a merchant eight years her senior. He was the third child of the tailor Jonas Reiner (born on 10 Feb. 1865 in Uhrynow seedne/Austria) and his wife Esther, née Schanz, born in 1867 in Radymno, a small village at the foot of the Carpathians in Poland, then Galicia, where they had married in 1889. Their four children were born there: Bertha/Brandl (on 17 Aug. 1890), Nathan (on 12 May 1895), Markus, called Max (on 15 Feb. 1898 – not 20 Feb. 1899, as stated in various references), and Lina (on 2 June 1899). They all had Austrian citizenship.

The Jonas Reiner family moved their permanent residence to Fürth on 30 Oct. 1906 and to Berlin on 18 Aug. 1913. However, Bertha was no longer with them, as she had married the shoemaker Gustav Schulewitz on 3 Sept. 1911. Max Reiner returned to Fürth once more on 17/18 May 1917 and lived with his sister Bertha.

According to Max Reiner’s daughter Vera, her father had attended elementary school (Volksschule) and high school in Fürth and had then become a soldier. After the end of the war, he had studied economics in Berlin and had become an in-house lawyer at Michael & Stark, a bank and chemicals trading company. His first wife recalled that he had received his doctorate with a thesis on recent results in colloid research. Chemistry was not yet a separate course of study at that time. Like many other dissertations, this one was lost.

In 1922, Max Reiner met Betty Avram, born on 8 Oct. 1901, whom he married in December of the same year. On 29 May 1924, their only child, daughter Vera, was born. She was two years old and remained with her mother when the marriage was divorced on 19 Dec. 1926.
Max Reiner moved to Hamburg and from there to Rostock, where he joined his father-in-law’s business. He continued to care for his daughter and gave her generous gifts.

With the world economic crisis, Benno and Berta Grünfeldt, too, ran into financial difficulties, gave up their business, and tried to make a new start in Hamburg. On 1 Apr. 1931, they moved to Kenzlersweg 4 in Hamburg-Hamm. Benno Grünfeldt worked as a commercial agent, but he did not succeed in establishing a new livelihood in the long term.

Max and Walli Reiner followed their parents to Hamburg and rented an apartment in Wandsbek at Friedrich-Ebertdamm 31 (today: Friedrich-Ebert-Damm, for a time, Adolf-Hitlerdamm) at the end of 1931. Max Reiner joined the Jewish Community. His income was so meager that he was exempted from paying taxes to the Community. On 1 Apr. 1933, he registered for residence in Berlin, but moved with Walli to live with her parents, who resided in their comparatively modest home in Hamburg-Hamm. Berta Grünfeldt managed the joint household, if necessary by drawing on savings and selling jewelry and other valuables.

Walli and Max Reiner decided to build a new life in Paris. From then on, Walli called herself Vally. As Austrians, they could enter without a visa, arriving in Paris on 10 June 1933. The new beginning was successful, and they established a ready-to-wear clothing store, which allowed them to support the Grünfeldt parents with regular bank transfers of 50 to 70 RM. In Oct. 1933, Max Reiner’s daughter Vera and her mother Betty, too, along with her second husband, Fritz Weinberg, moved in with them. They lived at 8 rue des Montiboeufs, Paris 20e, in an amicable cohabitation, as their daughter Vera, married name Cartagenian, later testified.

In 1935, the money sent to Benno and Berta Grünfeldt by Benno’s brother Emil, who had emigrated to the USA, and by the daughter Vally from Paris, was no longer sufficient to cover their living expenses and medical costs. As a result, they received welfare support. In 1936, they joined the Hamburg Jewish Community.

Until 1938, Berta Grünfeldt visited her daughter once a year in Paris, who in turn had returned to Kentzlersweg one last time in 1937. In July 1938, Benno and Berta Grünfeldt moved from Kentzlersweg to a two-room apartment at Dillstrasse 20 in the Grindel quarter. In the national census of May 1939, Berta Grünfeldt was registered as non-Jewish, but she retained her membership of the Jewish Community.

In 1940, Benno and Berta Grünfeldt were first assessed by the Jewish Community as possibly liable to pay contributions. Until then, they were considered to be without income due to support from relatives and welfare. They remained exempt. As long as she was a member of the Jewish Community, Berta Grünfeldt was regarded as Jewish, a so-called "Jewess by definition” ("Geltungsjüdin”). This status subjected her to the same persecution measures as all Jews. As they did not reach the asset limit of 1000 RM (reichsmark), Berta and Benno Grünfeldt were exempted from all measures of asset control and confiscation.

Until the occupation of Paris by the German Wehrmacht on 14 June 1940, the Reiner couple had a good income. Afterward, it dropped due to the anti-Jewish measures of the occupying power, but as late as 1941, Vally Reiner supported her parents as much as she could by using cover addresses in Stuttgart and Berlin. Like all German citizens, which Max and Vally Reiner were now considered to be in France, they were first imprisoned in 1940 due to measures by the aliens branch of police, but were released soon after. From 7 June 1942 onward, they had to wear the Star of David. This marked the end of the nine most peaceful years of their lives.

In July 1942, contact with Vally’s parents broke off. At the end of 1942, Berta Grünfeldt made enquiries about her daughter in Paris, both with acquaintances and Rabbi Langer of the "Union Générale des Israélites des France,” but received no information about her whereabouts.

Vally and Max Reiner had been committed to the Drancy transit camp near Paris on 16 July 1942 and deported to Auschwitz on 24 and 25 July 1942. The French government later dated their deaths to 29 July 1942, according to which Vally Reiner, née Grünfeldt, would have been 35 years old, Dr. Max Reiner 41 years old. In view of their age, it cannot be ruled out that they were still called up for forced labor deployments.

Berta Grünfeldt resigned from the Hamburg Jewish Community on 10 Dec. 1942. Her status and that of her husband Benno were henceforth unclear: Although she was an "Aryan” and married to the "full Jew” Benno Grünfeldt, since her daughter had been brought up Jewish and, moreover, no longer lived with them, the marriage could not be considered "privileged” ("privilegiert”).

In Nov. 1944, Benno Grünfeldt was imprisoned in Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp for reasons unknown to us, but he was released after four weeks. Under poor circumstances, he and his wife experienced the end of Nazi rule in Hamburg and the liberation by the British Army on 3 May 1945. There are no clues to a deportation order or to pressure from the Gestapo to divorce him.

On 22 Sept. 1945, Benno Grünfeldt was run over by a British military vehicle and died during transport to the University Hospital in Eppendorf. Berta Grünfeldt received a widow’s pension and a parental pension in relation to her daughter Walli/Vally and died in Hamburg on 10 August 1965 at the age of 84. She never learned anything about the final fate of her daughter. In 1991, the Arolsen special post office issued Walli Reiner’s death certificate.

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

Stand: September 2020
© Hildegard Thevs

Quellen: 1, 5, 8, 9; Adressbücher Hamburg, Rostock; StaHH 213-13 Rückerstattung, 19390; 332-5, Personenstandsregister; 351-11 Wiedergutmachung, 46940, darin Meldekartei Gemeinde Wandsbek; Stadtarchiv Rostock, Personenstandsunterlagen; Stadtarchiv Fürth, Melderegister; freundliche Mitteilungen von Angrit Lorenzen-Schmidt. Zur Nummerierung häufig genutzter Quellen siehe Link "Recherche und Quellen".