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Marie Hoffmann (née Zuer) * 1882

Schloßmühlendamm 10 (Harburg, Harburg)

HIER ARBEITETE
MARIE HOFFMANN
GEB. ZUER
JG. 1882
"POLENAKTION" 1938
BENTSCHEN / ZBASZYN
ERMORDET IM
BESETZTEN POLEN

further stumbling stones in Schloßmühlendamm 10:
Munisch Hoffmann

Marie Hoffmann, née Zuer, born on 5 Apr. 1882 in Leipzig, expelled to Zbaszyn on 28 Oct. 1938, murdered in occupied Poland
Munisch Hoffmann, born on 3 June 1881 in Stanislau (today Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine), expelled to Zbaszyn on 28 Oct. 1938, murdered in occupied Poland

Harburg-Altstadt quarter, Schlossmühlendamm 10 (formerly: Lüneburger Strasse 1)

When Munisch Menachem Hoffmann was born in a Jewish home, his native town belonged to the Austrian crown land of Galicia. Today Ivano-Frankivsk (formerly Stanislau), near Lviv (formerly Lemberg), is a Ukrainian town. Even then, smokestacks, sawmills, and drilling rigs were the hallmarks of the cityscape. The population consisted essentially of four ethnic groups, who by no means lived side by side without tension. The German minority was active in state and church administration as well as in education. German was the official language, but the other ethnic groups spoke it only as a second language or not at all. Ukrainians and Poles fought each other wherever they had the opportunity. They only agreed when it came to "spoiling things for” the Jews, who made up almost half of the city’s population.

This tense situation may have moved some young people to try their luck elsewhere. Whether that also applied to Munisch Hoffmann, we do not know. Anyway, as a young man he left his hometown for Germany. In Leipzig, he met Marie Zuer, also Jewish, whom he married in 1906. There the young parents experienced the birth of their daughter Erna on 18 Feb. 1908 and of their son Henry on 5 Sept. 1909.

The family then moved to Altona, where the children Lena (on 5 Apr. 1914), Bertha (on 11 Feb. 1916), Nitta (on 19 Nov. 1920), Hella (on 10 Feb. 1923), and Manfred (on 20 Oct. 1927) were born. Later the family lived at Bundesstrasse 31 in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel.

Munisch Hoffmann ran a wholesale and retail business for leather goods and shoe accessories and he owned several shoe repair workshops and leather goods stores, which he had entered in the register of qualified craftsmen or the company register, usually under the name of other family members, for tax reasons. These stores and workshops were located at Schulterblatt 117 in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel, at Hamburger Strasse 201 in Hamburg-Barmbek, at Valentinskamp 86 in Hamburg-Mitte, and last but not least at Lüneburger Strasse 1 in Harburg.

As can be seen from the entries on the Jewish religious tax (Kultussteuer) file card of the Hamburg German-Israelitic Community, before 1933 he achieved an annual gross income of about 5,500 RM (reichsmark), which declined in the following years.

Although Munisch Hoffmann had lived in Germany for over 20 years, he did not have German citizenship. On 6 Oct. 1938, the Polish Ministry of the Interior called on all Polish citizens living abroad to have their passports renewed by the end of the month. Those who did not comply were to lose the right to return to Poland. This announcement prompted the Nazi government to deport more than 17,000 Jews of Polish nationality from the German Reich to the neighboring country in the dead of night on 28 Oct. 1938.

Among the approximately 1,000 Jews affected in Hamburg were Munisch and Marie Hoffmann with their four youngest children Bertha, Nitta, Hella, and Manfred. They were picked up from their apartment in the early morning of that day and taken by train from Altona station to the German-Polish border in the evening. There they had to get out and start the march to the Polish city of Zbaszyn under blows with truncheons.

The Polish authorities were completely surprised by this stream of displaced persons. After letting the first groups enter the city, they refused entry to the ones following, so that the affected people were left to their own devices. The emergency shelters built in no-man’s-land with international aid were initially chaotic. Only those who found refuge with Polish relatives were allowed to continue their journey. After some time, the Hoffmann family found accommodation with close friends in Wieliczka near Krakow.

In the meantime, their Harburg business was devastated by "young people” on 10 Nov. 1938 during the night of the November Pogrom, and it is no longer possible to determine whether the Hoffmanns even learned about it.

After the invasion of Poland by the German Wehrmacht and the occupation of the country by German troops in Sept. 1939, the Jewish inhabitants of Wieliczka had to move into a ghetto. In the spring of 1942, Polish Jews were deported to the extermination camps, which had meanwhile been built in great haste. The last sign of life of the Hoffmann family was a message transmitted in early 1942. After that, contact to the parents and their children in the ghetto broke off.

As the year progressed, one deportation train after another left the town, and none of the deportees knew exactly where the journey was going. Only at their destination did they realize that they were standing before their murderers. For Munisch and Marie Hoffmann and their four youngest children Bertha, Nitta, Hella, and Manfred, too, the transport from the Wieliczka Ghetto was a journey to death.

Their three older children, Erna Tugendhaft, née Hoffmann, Henry Hoffmann, and Lena Salomon, née Hoffmann, are also among the victims of the Holocaust.

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

Stand: June 2020
© Klaus Möller

Quellen: Hamburger jüdische Opfer des Nationalsozialismus. Gedenkbuch, Jürgen Sielemann, Paul Flamme (Hrsg.), Hamburg 1995; Gedenkbuch. Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933–1945, Bundesarchiv (Hrsg.), Koblenz 2006; Yad Vashem. The Central Database of Shoa Victims´ Names: www.yadvashem.org; Staatsarchiv Hamburg 351-11_5232; Harburger Adressbuch 1938; Elisabeth Freundlich, Die Ermordung einer Stadt namens Stanislau, NS-Vernichtungspolitik in Polen 1939–1945, Wien 1986; Jürgen Sielemann, Fragen und Antworten zur `Reichskristallnacht´, in: Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte, Bd. 83/1, Hamburg 1997.