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Grete Rhein, 1939
© Privatbesitz

Grete Rhein (née Pulvermacher) * 1906

Krohnskamp 3 (Hamburg-Nord, Winterhude)

HIER WOHNTE
GRETE RHEIN
GEB. PULVERMACHER
JG. 1906
DEPORTIERT 1941
RIGA
ERMORDET

Wally Frieda Grete Rhein, née Pulvermacher, born 3.2.1906 in Hamburg, deported to Riga-Jungfernhof 6.12.1941.

Krohnskamp 3

Grete Rhein belonged to the approximately 120,000 Christians with Jewish roots who were classified as "non-Aryans" by the racial mania of National Socialism. "For the National Socialists they were Jews and were treated in exactly the same way, namely persecuted, up to and including murder. That is, all measures of exclusion and harassment affected them to the same extent. They were excluded from public life and, during the war, from the end of 1941, they were also deported to the extermination camps. [...]. They were [...] denied their German and, according to their perception, also their Christian identity," says the Hamburg historian Professor Ursula Büttner.
What a shock the "Nuremberg Race Laws", passed in 1935, meant for these people, and how many of those affected had no idea of their "Jewish origin" until then, cannot be estimated.

Grete's parents, the merchant Hugo Pulvermacher (1861-1918), born in Annaberg, and Johanna Emma, née Behrend (1869-1917), born in Chemnitz, married in Hamburg in November 1893. According to the entry in the civil register, both were "of Lutheran religion".
Emma's parents Elias Gottlieb Behrend (1839-1907) and Feodore, née Wolff (1840-1907), had been baptised at an unknown date after 1882, for on the civil register entry of their son Walter (1882-1953) they are still listed as of "Jewish religion", on both their death entries in 1907 it says "Lutheran religion".

Hugo Pulvermacher's parents Rosa, née Oppler (1832-1904), and Marcus Pulvermacher (1809-1890), "Wirtschaftsdirektor" (economic director) by profession, were obviously not converted, because they are buried in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Breslau (now Wroclaw/Poland).

Thirteen months after Grete's parents' wedding, on 3 December 1894, their son Gottlieb Otto Max was born, followed in 1895 and 1897 by their daughters Feodore Paula Else and Helene Käthe Lisbeth. Grete, the youngest daughter, was born in her parents' home, as was customary at the time.
The family lived at Papenhuder Straße 39 on Uhlenhorst, very close to the Behrend grandparents, who lived at number 28. Grete was baptised on 20 December 1907 in the church of St. Gertrud, Immenhof. Godparents were her uncle Walter Behrend, her mother's brother, and one "Mrs. Frieda Radel".


In September 1909, the Pulvermacher family moved to Groß Flottbek into the house Theodor Körner Straße 12 (today Müllenhoffweg). The village Groß Flottbek belonged to Prussia since 1866 and only became part of Hamburg in 1938. Because of the train connection to Hamburg it was a popular residential quarter for wealthy Hamburg merchants. A historic postcard from 1914 shows a row of upper middle-class villas that offered enough space for a family with four children and probably servants. Hugo retained his business premises at Schopenstehl 33 in Hamburg's old town, he appears in the Hamburg address book as the owner of the company G. London Nachfolger (G. London Successor) Mehl- und Mühlenfabrikate (flour and mill products).

In 1917, when Grete was eleven years old, she experienced the first two of the many losses that were to shape her furtur life. On 3 August, her mother Johanna Emma died. A few weeks later, on 31 August 1917, her brother Max succumbed in Macedonia to the wounding he had received while fighting as a lieutenant in the reserve in May 1917.

After the death of his wife, Hugo Pulvermacher moved back to Hamburg with his daughters Lisbeth and Grete, to Klosterallee 24. Grete had to leave her previous school, the Bertha Lyzeum, which she had attended since 1912, and was transferred to a secondary school for girls run by Miss M. Henckel in Rotherbaum.


One year later, on 16 November 1918, the next blow of fate followed, Grete's father died. The household in Klosterallee was dissolved and the house in Groß Flottbek sold. Grete was now an orphan and, being a minor, was placed under guardianship. Thanks to the still existing file of the Hamburg guardianship authority, we have information about the following years.


The guardians, the merchant Anton Nathusius and the lawyer Edgar Cohen (later renamed Wiegers), had to report regularly to the guardianship authority. Thus on 31 March 1919 it states: "Grete Pulvermacher has been living with her aunt Frl. Käthe Behrend Gross Flottbek Bogenstraße 11 since 15 February 1919 for board and lodging, attends the Gymnasium run by Frl. M. Henckel, Tesdorpfstraße 16 and will transfer to the Klosterschule Holzdamm at Easter 1919. Care and guidance are satisfactory in every way."

Käthe Behrend was the sister of Grete's mother and had worked as a senior teacher of mathematics, French and English at the Bertha Lyzeum in Othmarschen since 1908. The building now houses the "Volkshochschule" (adult education centre). The house at Bogenstraße 11 in Gross Flottbek belonged to a relative of her friend Antonie Brockmeyer, who ran a secondary school for girls and boys at Reventlowstraße 47. The two women later lived together in different flats and probably raised Grete together. Years later, Käthe was also classified as a Jew, although she belonged to the Protestant church. She lost her job, and when the Nazis banned Jewish and non-Jewish people from living together, Käthe had to move out of the flat she shared with her friend and came to live with Grete at Krohnskamp 3. She perished in Theresienstadt (see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de).

Grete was now facing a second change of school within a short time. Her "registration for admission to the educational institutions of the St. Johannis monastery" has been preserved, as have her leaving certificates. In 1918, the Bertha Lyceum gave the twelve-year-old good or very good marks in all subjects, only "writing" was marked "sufficient". The foreign languages English ("very good") and French ("good") were also on the curriculum.

Grete`s guardians were also responsible for settling Hugo Pulvermacher's inheritance. The legacy available for distribution among the three heirs (Grete and her sisters Else and Lisbeth), largely securities and war bonds, amounted to 438,843.96 Marks on 31 March 1919. Else was already married to Viktor Reuss at this time and lived in Stuttgart. We know almost nothing about Lisbeth Pulvermacher's life. She was already of legal age at this time.

The list of expenses for Grete's maintenance to be submitted annually to the guardianship authority showed the following in 1919 (excerpt): Living expenses for the month of June 230 M, school fees Klosteschule in June 60 M, instalment for life insurance in July 482.40 M, school fees for Grete's previous school M. Henckel January to March 105 M, inheritance tax (pro rata) 840.50 M. This was offset by income from interest, dividends and the sale of securities by the guardian.

The development of inflation in Germany can be vividly traced from the records. In 1922, for example, the living expenses in May amounted to 900 Marks, in November already to 3000 Marks. In July 1924, Anton Nathusius wrote to the guardianship authority: "With reference to your enquiry about the accounts for the year 1923, I would like to inform you that as a result of the devaluation of the papers, the assets in administration have not yielded any income. The maintenance costs for the ward have been paid by her relatives.- The assets of the ward are calculated as follows according to today's rates: [...] M. 990.52. The ward is in good care with her aunt, Miss Käthe Behrend in Othmarschen, Giesestr. 8. [...]". When Grete came of age in February 1927, her credit balance was 295.90 Reichsmark.

Grete will not only have been financially supported by her aunt Käthe and perhaps her friend, but probably also by her uncle and godfather Walter Behrend, Käthe's brother. From 1916 until his dismissal in 1937 "for racial reasons", Walter Behrend was director of the Hille Werke AG in Dresden, where drilling machines and trucks were produced. After Grete came of age, he took over the administration of her valuables.

Grete left the Klosterschule at Easter 1923 with a good leaving certificate. In addition to English and French, she had now also learned Latin (grade sufficient), and she was "very good" at mathematics, chemistry and gymnastics. In April she began a three-year bookseller's apprenticeship at the export bookshop Martin Riegel, whose shop was in Grindelberg.

Side note: Martin Riegel joined the NSDAP in 1932 and was state chairman of the "Reichsschrifttumskammer Gruppe Buchhandel" from autumn 1934 to autumn 1938. In a police report of 14 September 1945 it says: "In his capacity as Landesobmann of the Reichsschrifttumskammer he participated in the liquidations of the non-Aryan bookshops".

We do not know whether Grete continued to work for Martin Riegel after completing her apprenticeship. A letter from Walter Behrend shows that she stayed with Dr. Hildebrandt in Niederzwehren near Kassel in December 1927. The general practitioner Jürgen Hildebrandt was the husband of Grete's sister Lisbeth. Three years later, on 31 May 1930, Lisbeth Hildebrandt died in Niederzwehren by suicide, as Grete's daughter states. Her death was reported to the registry office by the local police authority. For Grete, this meant another heavy loss after the early death of her parents and brother.

When she reached full age , the guardianship authority's file was closed. We have no information about the next years in Grete's life. According to her daughter she met her futur husband, the bookseller Peter Heinrich Hermann Rhein, at the Leipzig Book Fair. He was born on 3 November 1906 in Regensburg and had completed his training in Würzburg. After working in Nuremberg and Lübeck, he settled in Göttingen. In September 1931, Grete and Hermann were married in Göttingen, witnesses were two young Göttingen students, none of Grete's family members. According to the registration file, the couple lived at Wörthstraße 26. For both of them, the "luth." (= Lutheran) in the "Religion" column had been crossed out and replaced by "resigned" [from church membership].

One and a half years later, in March 1933, the young couple moved to Wismar, Lindenstraße 27 (Adolf-Hitler-Straße since 10 April 1933). Hermann Rhein had come across the Bartholdische Buchhandlung in the Hanseatic town while looking for a bookshop with which to start his own business. Grete's daughter writes that her parents ran the bookshop together. However, only Hermann Rhein is entered in the commercial register.


At the time of the move to Wismar, Grete was already pregnant. Five months later, on 10 August 1933, she gave birth to her daughter Eva Toni in Wismar. With her middle name she was named after Antonie Brockmeyer, the friend of Grete's aunt Käthe. 

On 15 September 1935, during the Reich Party Congress in Nuremberg, in the presence of Adolf Hitler, the Reichstag passed laws with far-reaching consequences for Jewish citizens in the German Reich, the so-called Nuremberg Laws. "They sealed the degradation of Jewish citizens to people of lesser rights and prepared their targeted, arbitrary discrimination and extermination" says a text of the Federal Agency for Civic Education.One of these laws, the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour", regulated the relations between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans.

Marriages as well as non-marital sexual relations were henceforth made punishable. The law did not affect existing marriages, but in the following period, couples in "mixed marriages" were urged to divorce by various parties (Gestapo, landlords, employers, etc.) after a long period of previous propaganda.

The definition of who was to be considered Jewish and thus not a "citizen of the Reich" was provided by the Nazis on 14 November 1935. Grete was now considered Jewish. And with that, an earlier ban took effect. Booksellers had to belong to the Reichsschrifttumskammer (Reich Chamber of Literature) in order to be allowed to run their business. If they were of Jewish descent or married to a person of Jewish descent, they were not admitted to the chamber and had to sell or close their business. Whether it was only this existential threat that led the couple to separate, we do not know. In any case, on 4 October 1935 the district court in Hamburg announced the divorce of Grete and Hermann Rhein.

In addition to the aforementioned loss of identity as a German and perhaps a Christian, although she had left the church, she was now also a divorced woman. In January 1936 she moved back to Hamburg with Eva, where she had friends and family, aunts Käthe and Toni (Antonie Brockmeyer) and, from 1937, her uncle Walter. At first they lived at Heidberg 19 B, a little later they moved into a first-floor flat at Krohnskamp 3. Hermann stayed in Wismar and kept the bookshop. Eva remembers the tense atmosphere when her father came to visit and sometimes took her on an outing. He did pay alimony, but Grete had to earn extra. According to her daughter, she spoke Italian and Spanish as well as English and French and did translation work and foreign-language correspondence for booksellers at home.

Grete was a loving mother who talked a lot with Eva. She remembers that her mother often took her on her lap or put her arm around her. The two of them often spent afternoons at the Alster or in the Stadtpark, there were visits to Hagenbeck's zoo and to the Dom, the Hamburg fun fair. At bedtime a goodnight story was read to her. In the summer of 1936, mother and daughter travelled to southern Germany to visit Grete's sister Else and her family. Else survived the Nazi dictatorship. She died in 1983.

At the end of the 1930s, life was made increasingly unbearable for Jewish people. At the latest since the November pogrom in 1938, it was clear to most that there was no future for them in Germany. However, emigration or finding a host country was almost impossible. The anti-Jewish measures also affected Grete. It is recorded in the registry office that she had to use the forced additional name "Sara" since 1 January 1939.

Around Easter 1939, she mentioned a trip to England to her daughter for the first time. Eva should go there alone at first, she said, to live with other people, and she would also have to learn another language. When she, the mother, had found a job in England, she would join her. As an adult, Eva learned that her mother had gone to Berlin to organise the necessary papers for a place on a Kindertransport.


This international rescue operation began in December 1938 in response to the previous November pogroms. Almost 10,000 children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and the Free Town Danzig were sent by their parents to safety in Britain, most never to see their mothers and fathers again. Thousands more children were on waiting lists. There were comparable actions on a much smaller scale for a few countries like Belgium, Sweden and the USA.

Eva set off on the journey to London on her sixth birthday, 10 August 1939. Three weeks later, Germany unleashed the Second World War with the invasion of Poland, and the children's transports were stopped.

For little Eva, who found herself all alone in a foreign country, unable to communicate with anyone and experiencing no warmth and hardly any understanding from her English host family, the situation was traumatic. She was very unhappy and missed her mother very much.


Grete had given away her only child and thus saved his life. We do not know whether she made any effort to follow her daughter. Perhaps she did not want to leave her aunt Käthe alone, who lived with her and to whom she owed so much, perhaps she had no more strength after all the previous losses.

Grete sent the above printed photo to England in August 1939. According to Eva, when correspondence with Great Britain was forbidden because of the war, she tried to keep in touch with the host family through a friend in Switzerland.

Eva still has the Christmas greetings from October 1941 that Grete sent her via the International Red Cross - "Maximum 25 words!". She herself had learned to write in the meantime and replied in English. Whether Grete still received the greetings is uncertain. On 6 December 1941 she was deported to Riga. She did not return.

Stand: September 2023
© Sabine Brunotte

Quellen: 5, 8; Eva Lorimer, My Story, The Association of Jewish Refugees, London 2022; Interview mit Prof. Ursula Büttner auf https://www.evangelisch.de/inhalte/161218/16-10-2019/so-erging-es-christen-juedischer-herkunft-der-ns-zeit, Zugriff 1.6.2023; https://de.findagrave.com/memorial/210685774/rosa-pulvermacher Zugriff 30.08.2023; https://de.findagrave.com/memorial/210685769/marcus-pulvermacher Zugriff 30.08.2023; StaH 332-5_8966; StaH 332-5_2816; StaH 332-5_2348; Tod Max Pulvermacher 31.8.1917, Standesamt Gr. Flottbek, Urkunde Nr. 49; StaH 332-5_2376; StaH 332-5_9130; Tod Lisbeth Hildebrandt 31.5.1930, Eintrag Standesamt Niederzwehren (Kassel), Urkunde Nr. 18, unter www.ancestryinstitution.de/discoveryui-content/view/1444246:61119?tid am 5.9.2023; StaH 332-5_4819; StaH 332-5_8049; StaH 332-5_6875; StaH 332-5_6876; StaH 232-1 D84; StaH 362-2/36_438; StaH 213-13_3816; StaH 331-4_27; https://agora.sub.uni-hamburg.de/subhh-adress/digbib/start, Adressbücher Hamburg von 1905-1910, 1938, 1939; Adressbücher Altona 1918-1923; Zugriff 6.8.2023; https://www.hamburg.de/sehenswertes-gross-flottbek/ Zugriff 11.8.2023; St. Gertrud Nr. 295, Taufregister von 1907, schriftliche Auskunft Archiv des Kirchenkreises Hamburg-Ost vom 13.4.2023; files.genealogy.net/verlustlisten/18430.jpg, Zugriff 19.3.2023; files.genealogy.net/verlustlisten/21186 jpg, Zugriff 19.3.2023; https://www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de/? HYPERLINK "https://www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de/?&MAIN_ID=7&r_name=Behrend&r_strasse=&r_bezirk=&r_stteil=&r_sort=Nachname_AUF&recherche=recherche&submitter=suchen&BIO_ID=867, Zugriff 2.6.2023; https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de zu Hille Werke AG Dresden, Zugriff 15.7.2023; https://wismarerkalenderblaetter-blog.tumblr.com/post/174502146597/embed zu Lindenstraße Wismar, Zugriff 15.7.2023; "https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/hintergrund-aktuell/501380/vor-85-jahren-nuernberger-gesetze-erlassen/ Zugriff 15.7.23; Ostsee-Zeitung Wismar 3.11.2016, S. 15, Artikel von Detlef Schmidt zum 110. Geburtstag von Hermann Rhein; Archiv Hansestadt Wismar, III Rep.1Aa Nr. 1136; Schriftliche Auskunft Stadtarchiv Göttingen, E-Mail vom 05.06.2023; schriftliche Auskunft des Enkels D. L., E-Mail vom 27.8.2023.
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