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Ludwig Walzer * 1927

Moorstraße 7 (Harburg, Harburg)

1941 Lodz

further stumbling stones in Moorstraße 7:
Henny Walzer, Norbert Walzer, Moritz Walzer

Henny Walzer, née Blättner, b. 6.10.1899 in Kassel, deported to Lodz on 10.25.1941, "resettled" to Chełmno on 5.15.1942
Ludwig Lothar Walzer, b. 4.6.1927 in Hamburg, deported to Lodz on 10.25.1941, "resettled" to Chełmno n 5.15.1942
Moritz Walzer, b. 5.3.1883 in Zablotow, deported from Mechelen (Belgium) to Auschwitz on 10.31.1942
Norbert Walzer, b. 1.19.1926 in Harburg, deported to Lodz on 10.25.1941, "resettled" to Chełmno on 5.15.1942

City District Harburg-Altstadt, Moorstraße 7 (former Moorstraße 4)

The Walzer furniture store at Moorstrasse 4 was among the Jewish enterprises that flourished in Harburg in the years after the First World War. The owner, Moritz Walzer, came from the small town of Zablotow (today, Sabolotiw) on the upper reaches of the Prut River, at the foot of the Carpathians in Galicia; before the war it belonged to the Hapsburg crown and in 1918 became Polish. Today it is part of the Ukraine and the birthplace of the famous Jewish writer, Manès Sperber, who won the peace prize of the German book trade in 1983. In 1910, 2171 Jews and 2587 others, mostly Ukrainians, lived in Zablotow. As Manès Sperber describes in his autobiography, the two different ethnic groups did not always get along peacefully.

Moritz Walzer’s second wife, Henny, also came from a Jewish family, which was native to Hesse. The three children, Klara (b. 1910), Norbert and Ludwig Lothar Walzer grew up in Harburg. The two boys at first attended the primary school nearby and then changed to the Harburg consolidated school, that is, the boy’s school on Elisenstrasse (today, Baererstrasse). They ended their school days at the Hamburg Talmud Torah school.

When, shortly after Hitler’s naming as Reich Chancellor, the Nazi Party, on 1 April 1933, called for a boycott of all Jewish businesses, medical practices, and lawyers‘ offices, the new masters of the Harburg magistracy placed the name of the Walzer firm on Moorstrasse on the list of targeted businesses. The furniture store was immediately excluded from further city contracts and, on 1 April, publicly identified as a business where "good Germans" would have nothing to do with.

Despite these measures, Moritz Walzer was able to hold on to most of his traditional customers in the following years; his taxable income from 1933 to 1938 remained virtually unchanged. This situation changed decisively in the last months of the year 1938. The "Ordinance for the Elimination of Jews from German Economic Life, from 12 November 1938, that banned Jews from further independent economic activity in commerce or the trades, annihilated the economic basis of Moritz Walzer’s existence. After this prohibition, there was nothing left for him to do than to sell his store and the property it was on at Otto-Telschow-Strasse 4, as the Moorstrasse is called today, at a price far below market value.

After the conclusion of this transaction, which needed the agreement of the Hamburg Nazi Party District Leader Karl Kaufmann, his accounts, on 27 March 1939, were immediately placed under a "safety order,” because Walzer was a Jew and his emigration was likely. Thereafter, aside from an allowance of 300 RM for his family’s living expenses, he was permitted access to his accounts only on the approval of the Office of the Chief Financial Governor of Hamburg.

That Moritz Walzer subsequently mobilized all his powers to get out of Germany as soon as possible was, under these circumstances, not surprising. His daughter Klara had left her homeland soon after 1933. In his emigration application he named the United States of America as his target destination. Yet before he could fulfill the last bureaucratic and financial requirements, the German attack on Poland had begun. Moriz Walzer fled after this to Belgium. Shortly thereafter, his son Ludwig found a place in a retraining camp which prepared Jewish young people for a future life as agricultural workers in Palestine. He could not, however, finish this training.

Shortly after the final ban on emigration for all German Jews went into effect, the Hamburg Gestapo issued an "evacuation order” for Henny Walzer and her fifteen-year old son Norbert, who were still living at Otto-Telschow-Straße in Harburg. The name of the fourteen-year old Ludwig was later added to the list. The Gestapo had ordered the deportation of the parents and under-age children together. Perhaps, it had at first "overlooked” the boy.

The transport led Henny Walzer and her two sons into the Lodz ghetto where they at first were lodged at Alexanderstrasse 31 and later at Hohensteinerstrasse 43, which, in each case, they had to share with five other people. Within the first months of the year 1942, approximately 45,000 Polish Jews and "Gypsies” in the ghetto had been murdered. In April 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered the expansion of the murder program to include all non-Poles from the closed off zone who were not working or were unable to work. The so-called resettlement of those affected began on Monday, 4 May 1942.

Eleven days later, Henny and her two sons left with the second great wave of deportations from the Radegaster railroad station in Lodz. This trip, like all the others, ended a few hours later in the extermination camp at Chelmno/Kulmhof, behind the walls of which was concealed a dilapidated castle. There, immediately after arrival, people were led into cellar rooms and from there, along a narrow path over a ramp, into the cargo area of mobile gas trucks. These vehicles and their personnel had already been deployed in the "T4”-Action. The corpses were then buried in a nearby forest.

After the occupation of Belgium by the German Armed Forces, the short reprieve Moritz Walzer had created by flight into the neighboring land also came to an end. Immediately in October 1940, Moritz Walzer, by order of the military administration, had to register as a Jew. There followed diverse ordinances that swiftly plunged the Jews in Belgium into material and human misery. Within two years, the first deportation trains rolled from this land to the East. On 30 October 1942, Moritz Walzer entered the collection camp Mechelen and was on the very next day transported to Auschwitz in the seventeenth Belgian deportation convoy.

The train trip lasted three days. Following the selection carried out on the off-load ramp, 777 men and women were taken to the camp. The other 919 human beings were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. We do not know which group Moritz Walzer was assigned to. On 9 March 1962, the Harburg District Court declared him dead as of the end of 1942.


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

Stand: May 2019
© Klaus Möller

Quellen: 1; 2 (F 2338 Moritz Walzer, R 1939/2083 Moritz Walzer, R 1940/1013 Henny Walzer); 4; 5; 8; StaH 351-11, AfW, Abl. 2008/1, 060427 Walzer, Ludwig Lothar, 190126 Walzer, Norbert; StaH, Bestand Harburg, 2 Stadtbücher, III 1 Bd. IX, Protokolle der Magistratssitzungen 1933; StaH, 430-5 Dienststelle Harburg, 1810-08, 430-74 Polizeipräsidium Harburg-Wilhelmsburg II, 60, 40; StaH, 430-5 Dienststelle Harburg, Ausschaltung jüdischer Geschäfte und Konsumvereine, 1810-08, Bl. 89ff.; Heyl (Hrsg.), Harburger Opfer; Heyl, Synagoge; http://www Het Joods Museum van de Deportatie Verzet, E-Mail: jmdv@telenet.be (14.1.2010); Czech, Kalendarium, S. 332; Krakowski, Chelmno/Kulmhof; Sperber, Vergangene, S. 14ff.
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