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Ferdinand Strompf * 1878

Lüneburger Straße 28 (Harburg, Harburg)

1943 Theresienstadt
ermordet am 2.6.1944

further stumbling stones in Lüneburger Straße 28:
Hedwig Strompf

Ferdinand Strompf, b. 9.30.1878 in Wachtl, deported to Theresienstadt on 6.9.1943, dying there on 6.2.1944
Hedwig Strompf, née Daltrop, b. 12.30.1890 in Harburg, deported to Theresienstadt on 6.9.1943, deported further to Auschwitz on 10.9.1944

Lüneburger Straße 28 (City district Harburg-Altstadt)

Hedwig Strompf was the third and youngest daughter of Jewish parents Philipp and Helene Daltrop, née Cotinho, who moved with their children from the Westphalian city Oelde to the banks of the Elbe. Hedwig’s sisters, Paula and Grete, were four and two years older than her respectively. The parental home of her Jewish husband was in Wachtl (today, Sk’ripov) in Moravia, which was until 1918 ruled by the Habsburgs; thereafter, it belonged to the new Czechoslovak Republic. It was in this locale that Ferdinand Strompf spent his childhood and youth, along with his sister Sofia and his two brothers Alois and Moritz, before leaving his home town to try his luck in a foreign land. It is not precisely known when he settled in Harburg. There he dealt in leather goods, while his wife worked as a domestic.

By 1936 at the latest, Ferdinand and Hedwig Strompf moved to the other bank of the Elbe, where they began to live – voluntarily or involuntarily – separate from one another. On 1 August 1936, Hedwig Strompf became a member of the German Israelite Congregation of Hamburg. Her address was listed as Isekai 18 in Hamburg-Eppendorf, with Hugo Heimann

At the beginning of 1943, instead of the 20,749 Jews who had been registered as members of the German Israelite Congregation of Hamburg in 1926, there were now only 1,805 people in the city who were Jews in the eyes of their persecutors. That was less than 10% of the membership of the Weimar Republic years. Of the residents of Hamburg, 718 were – as they were called in the Jewish community – "star bearers,” that is, Jews who were not living in "privileged” mixed marriages. Ferdinand and Hedwig Strompf belonged to this group.

At this point in time, they lived at Beneckestrasse 4, in one of the "Jew houses" not yet confiscated by the Nazi authorities. In these houses, formally belonging to the Jewish Religious Association of Hamburg or the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, people lived in extremely straitened circumstances in a kind of compulsory ghetto. As a rule, two people had to be satisfied with one room. In purely mathematical terms, each person was allotted 64.5 sq. feet. Beyond this, from the autumn of 1942, 230 chronically ill people or those in need of care were distributed in four homes of the Jewish Religious Association.

At the end of 1942 and beginning of 1943, there began in Hamburg, as in other parts of the Reich, the next phase of the so-called Final Solution. The small numbers of those who had not yet been deported were to remain for only a short time. An order from the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) dating from 21 May 1943, decreed that, by 30 June 1943 at the latest, Jews be transported out of the territory of the Reich to Theresienstadt. In the previous five months, 226 Hamburg Jews had already left the Hansa City in deportation trains for that destination. Even before 1 July, two more transports had followed.

Hedwig and Ferdinand Strompf had to prepare themselves for the 6 June 1943 transport with 78 other people. Unlike the previous deportations of 1941 and 1942 in which each consisted of up to 1000 people, those scheduled between 1943 to 1945, such as the one Ferdinand and Hedwig Strompf were on, contained far fewer people. For these only an "extra car” was required to be attached to an already scheduled train.

The train on which Hedwig and Ferdinand Strompf found themselves on 9 June 1943 needed two days to get from Hamburg to Theresienstadt. The added car was the first that traveled directly from Hamburg into the ghetto, ten days after the spur from Bauschowitz to Theresienstadt had been completed. Up to that point, deportees had had to travel the last three kilometers by foot with all their luggage.

Within the first weeks after their arrival, Hedwig Strompf reported by postcard to their Hamburg relations; they learned that the couple had reached their assigned destination and that the trip had been bearable.

Because of the censorship of the mail, Hedwig Strompf could not precisely describe to her Hamburg relations the inhuman living conditions that prevailed in the ghetto. Among them, the old people suffered the most. No other group had as high a mortality rate as this one. Within a year, Ferdinand Strompf, too, came to the end of his strength. He died on 2 June 1944 at the age of 66.

In the autumn of 1944, over 20,000 people were sent from Theresienstadt to their deaths in Auschwitz. Among them was Hedwig Strompf, who began her trip to the extermination camp on 9 October 1944. Her transport of 1,550 people arrived on the same day in Auschwitz II concentration camp. Shortly before this, several prisoners of the Sonderkommando 59B had set Crematorium 4 afire and undertook an attempted escape. Because the other crematoria remained undamaged, however, the camp leadership continued operation of the murder program largely uninterrupted. Upon arrival of the transport from Theresienstadt the selections were still made on the ramps; 191 women able to work and several dozen men were taken into the camp, and the others were sent to the gas chambers. Their bodies were immediately thereafter incinerated in Crematorium II.

Only 76 people from the Theresienstadt transport of 9 October 1944 were still alive at the end of the Second World War. Hedwig Strompf was not one of them.

Counted among the victims of the Shoah were also her sister Grete Marcus, née Daltrop, along with her husband Hugo, as well as her two brothers-in-law, Alois and Moritz Strompf with their wives, children, and daughter-in-law Sofia Weiss, née Strompf and her husband Jacob.


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

Stand: January 2019
© Klaus Möller

Quellen: 1; 4; 5; 7; 8; StaH, 351-11, AfW, Abl. 2008/1, 291286, Jacob, Paula, 141208 Worthmann, Ingeborg, 150412 Marcus, Fritz; Heyl (Hrsg.), Harburger Opfer; Heyl, Synagoge, S. 225; Czech, Kalendarium, 2. Auflage, S. 897ff.; Gottwaldt/Schulle, "Judendeportationen", S. 337ff.; Mosel, Wegweiser, Heft 3, S. 133ff.
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