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Philipp Auerbach * 1906

Brahmsallee 17 (Eimsbüttel, Harvestehude)

HIER WOHNTE
PHILIPP AUERBACH
JG. 1906
FLUCHT 1936 BELGIEN
INTERNIERT SAINT-CYPRIEN
DEPORTIERT 1944 AUSCHWITZ
KZ BUCHENWALD
BEFREIT
FLUCHT IN DEN TOD 1952

further stumbling stones in Brahmsallee 17:
Leopold Appel, Aron Auerbach, Henny Schwabe, Julius Schwabe

Hans-Hermann Klare: Speech at the dedication of the Stolpersteine for Aron and Philipp Auerbach on June 22, 2024, Brahmsallee 17 Hamburg-Harvestehude

Aaron Auerbach was a merchant. He mainly traded in chemicals, metals and ores. Until the global economic crisis, business was so good that he not only made his son Philipp an authorized signatory after training as a chemist, but was also able to send him to Spain to look for deals in Salamanca for the rare tungsten.

Father of nine children, Aaron Auerbach's family lived an orthodox life in the Grindel district. This is why he was involved in the Talmud Torah School, a secondary school at the time, to which he sent his son Philipp. That's why he was on the board of an association that campaigned for ritual food houses for Jews. That is why he took care of the Eastern Jews who came to Hamburg at the beginning of the 20th century, fleeing the pogroms of the declining Tsarist Empire.

Orthodoxy - that didn't just mean going to synagogue regularly, respecting the Sabbath and eating according to the faith. The father also insisted on praying regularly with the children. And it hit him hard when one of his older sons announced that he was leaving the religious community because he could not believe in one God. This son was given the name Zelig after his grandfather, who had been a rabbi in Halberstadt. Zelig was supposed to continue the life of this deceased ancestor, so to speak. But then he decided against religion and his parents. His father Aaron, in particular, declared him dead, so to speak. They probably sat shiva, mourned for seven days for this Zelig, who from then on called himself Walter, and forbade the children to have any contact with him.

Philipp became all the more important. This also applied when Philipp went into exile in Belgium after the National Socialists seized power. More on this later. There, the son built up a trade in chemicals and metals on the basis of his business experience in his father's company and also maintained relationships with the now small company of his father and his eldest brother Eli, who worked with him. This was particularly fatal for Aaron Auerbach.
In April 1938, the Gestapo arrived early in the morning at the door of his apartment in Hansastraße. They arrested Aaron and Eli and took them both to Kolafu, the concentration camp on the grounds of the prison in Fuhlsbüttel, which had been set up for opponents of the regime. An eyewitness in the house later stated: "To be honest, it looked like criminals were taking away a decent person.”

Aaron and Eli were suspected of smuggling and producing weapons for enemy powers by helping Philip in Belgium to ship these materials to Spain. Civil war was raging there at the time. The Popular Front was fighting against the fascists and their coup d'état under the leadership of General Franco. The Popular Front received help from all over Europe, from left-wing groups, not least from Jews who volunteered to fight. It was clear to them that Franco's victory would make the situation of the Jews even worse. Philipp Auerbach took part in this in his own way.

The Belgian immigration police and Gestapo found out about him and suspected Philipp's father Aaron of being involved in this treason and high treason. Aaron Auerbach was sent to a concentration camp. There are no more documents about this. They have disappeared or been destroyed. But one must assume that a prisoner accused of such serious offenses was treated in the Kolafu as was customary. The interrogations were accompanied by threats, kicks and brutal beatings. The list of the 1500 prisoners abused there is long. While the two Auerbachs were being interrogated, unknown persons cleared out the apartment in Hansastraße and took crockery, cutlery and furniture.

Obviously, the Gestapo officers did not find any solid evidence for the suspicion of treason. And Aaron and Eli Auerbach had not confessed to anything in the interrogations either, if only for fear of further violence. In 1939, Eli managed to be released from prison and emigrate to the USA before the war began.

Aaron Auerbach was not granted such a lucky escape. After weeks in a miserably cold and damp prison cell, he was in such a bad way that he was taken to a Jewish hospital. He died there in July 1938 as a result of uremia. Blood in the kidneys could have various causes. In his case, the Kolafu and the Nazi henchmen working there were his undoing. Aaron Auerbach was 69 years old.


Philipp Auerbach was, if the word does not sound cynical in connection with extermination camps, a survivor. Arrested after the Wehrmacht invasion of Belgium in May 1940 and deported to France, he survived various camps in the south of France, Gestapo prisons and interrogations in Berlin as well as Auschwitz and Buchenwald. If we are remembering him today and unveiling a Stumbling Stone for him, it is because he was hunted down by the Nazis, so to speak, when Hitler's regime had already been a thing of the past for seven years.

Born in 1906, the young Philipp Auerbach trained as a chemist and became politically active in the 1920s during the Weimar Republic alongside his work in his father's store. He marched with the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold (Black-Red-Gold Banner) so as not to leave the streets to the right-wing members of the Stahlhelm and SA or the left-wing members of the Rotkämpferbund. In contrast to them, he believed in a democratic Germany and, having barely grown up, also appeared as a speaker at rallies in the Hamburg area, in the Altes Land and in the Heide, where the SA in particular was growing in popularity. It was clear that his time was coming to an end with the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany. Being a Jew and a democrat had become dangerous.

Philipp Auerbach went into exile in Antwerp at the end of 1934, soon bringing his wife and young daughter with him and setting up a chemicals business there. When General Franco's fascists took power in Spain, Philipp Auerbach supported the Popular Front against the dictator not only ideologically, but also practically. He supplied them with material for building bombs and grenades, even though this was forbidden. The German Reich therefore revoked his and his family's German citizenship, while the consequences for his father - as described above - were initially worse.

When the Wehrmacht invaded Belgium in May 1940, his odyssey of suffering began with his deportation. While his family managed to find him months later in the Gurs camp near the Pyrenees and eventually even managed to obtain visas to leave for Cuba, they had to leave Philipp Auerbach behind. Severely ill and bedridden, his wife Martha saw him for the last time before boarding a ship across the Atlantic via Marseille and Lisbon. Philipp Auerbach was soon extradited to the Germans, possibly sentenced to death in absentia or at least threatened with death, taken to Berlin and finally transported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.

This is not the time to tell the story of how he managed to survive the extermination camps. It was, in short, a combination of fortunate circumstances and a tremendous survival instinct. He even survived the death march from Auschwitz, in which around half of the concentration camp inmates died, despite the icy cold, trigger-happy SS men and extreme hunger.

And he was one of the few Jews who believed in a future for the Jews in Germany after the end of the Nazi regime, despite his terrible experiences. In 1946, he was appointed state commissioner for politically, racially and religiously persecuted people in the American occupation zone. Promoted by the US military administration, he thus became the most important advocate for the so-called DPs, the displaced persons, the survivors of Nazi persecution.

With an office he set up there, he initially helped to provide around 100,000 Jews with the bare necessities, i.e. accommodation, clothing and food. Later, he took care of visas for emigration, especially to Palestine, and reparations for the injustices committed.

It may have been commendable to look after the often sick, always impoverished, always traumatized survivors of the extermination camps. It made Philipp Auerbach an uncomfortable man. He constantly reminded the Germans of what they were trying to forget: the crimes of the Germans. And he made demands: For reparation and compensation. He also believed that a democratic Germany could only emerge if Nazis were kept out of the country's civil service. In doing so, he made an enemy of many politicians whose biographies were not as clean as the occupation authorities and the public were led to believe. Auerbach became a troublemaker.
As long as the American military administration held its protective hand over him, German politicians did not dare to take action against him. But the more independent the Federal Republic became, the greater the attacks. He didn't just receive hate mail. Newspaper coverage of the prominent Jewish functionary was not without anti-Semitic undertones. This was not only true of conservative media. Even "Der Spiegel” and "Christ und Welt” were not free of them.

Philipp Auerbach was arrested in 1951, allegedly because he had enriched himself as head of the authorities, because he was corrupt, because he bribed and accepted bribes. If you look at the reports from that time, it seems that nobody believed in his innocence. The trial took place in 1952. His judges were all former Nazis. The attempt by Auerbach's lawyers to exclude them from such a trial due to concerns of bias against a concentration camp survivor and Jewish functionary failed. All three judges had made a career during the Nazi era and were considered unsuitable for judicial office immediately after the war. With the Christmas amnesties in Bavaria in 1948 and 1949, it was decided to be lenient with such jurists. They were made civil servants again. And the Bavarian Minister of Justice made sure that the trial was not presided over by the judge designated according to the duty roster, but by a lawyer he knew.

In the four months of the trial at Munich District Court One, all the main accusations collapsed. He could not be proven to have enriched himself. Auerbach was indeed as poor as a church mouse. And the crucial witness on whom the verdict was based was already on trial elsewhere in Munich during the Auerbach trial for perjury and shortly afterwards lost his right to testify as a witness in a trial.

Nevertheless, the judges sentenced Philipp Auerbach to two and a half years in prison and a fine. Two and a half years for the initially unauthorized use of a doctoral title and for sloppy bookkeeping in the chaos of the post-war period - this was grotesque not only for Auerbach's family and friends. Shortly before, a Nazi functionary and participant in the Wannsee Conference, at which the so-called Final Solution of the Jews had once been planned, had been sentenced to just three and a half years in prison for participating in the murder of over 1,300 Jews.

Philipp Auerbach took his own life on the night of the verdict in August 1952. He left behind two farewell letters. One for the public. It ended with an Old Testament curse: "My blood be on the head of the perjured.”

The letter to his family, however, ended: "It is not out of cowardice that I choose this path, but because there is no more right for me.”

Somehow, Philipp Auerbach had survived the Nazi regime. Somehow the Nazis had still hunted him down at the age of 45.
Status August 2024

Translation: Beate Meyer
Stand: November 2024
© Hans-Hermann Klare ist Autor des Buches "Auerbach". Eine jüdisch-deutsche Tragödie oder Wie der Antisemitismus den Krieg überlebte, Berlin 2022.