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Kurt Berlin
© Ursula Hosse

Kurt Berlin * 1920

Mörkenstraße 4 vormals Hausnummer 3 (Altona, Altona-Altstadt)

1941 Minsk
ermordet

further stumbling stones in Mörkenstraße 4 vormals Hausnummer 3:
Georg Loschinski, Dora Loschinski

Kurt Berlin, born on 12 July 1920, deported on 8 Nov. 1941 to Minsk, murdered
Dora Loschinski, née Sacharewitz, widowed name Berlin, born on 11 Sept. 1892, deported on 8 Nov. 1941 to Minsk, murdered
Georg Loschinski, born on 2 Apr. 1891, deported on 8 Nov. 1941 to Minsk, murdered

Mörkenstrasse 4 (Mörkenstrasse 3)

Deborah, called Dora, Sacharewitz was born on 11 Sept. 1892 in Liepaja (German: Libau) in today’s Latvia near the city of Riga as the daughter of Michael and Anna Sacharewitz. The Jewish couple had another daughter, named Fenia, later called Fanny.

In about 1905, Anna Sacharewitz fled with her daughters from the first revolutionary uprisings from Vitebsk, Belarus, to Germany. Her husband, Michael Sacharewitz, who owned a factory in Vitebsk, stayed. Apparently, as Cornelia von Schröders, the great granddaughter of Anna Sacharewitz, reported based on family tradition, he later took his own life in Odessa.

Anna Sacharewitz lived in Düsseldorf with her daughters, where she gave piano lessons. In Düsseldorf, Fenia met the medical student Georg Martin Hosse, whom she subsequently married. He was non-Jewish; she converted to the Protestant faith.

Dora got married to Siegfried Berlin, a native of Hamburg born on 10 Oct. 1884. The couple had two children. On 24 June 1918, daughter Malchen was born; on 12 July 1920, son Kurt followed.

The Jewish Berlin family owned a house at Grindelallee 132 in the Rotherbaum quarter of the Eimsbüttel district, where even Siegfried Berlin’s grandfather had already operated a grocery store. Since the 1920s, Siegfried Berlin ran a goldsmith’s workshop there. Starting in 1919, he was the head of the Synagogue Community.

The Berlin family looked back on a family history with many branches. The great-great-grandfather of Siegfried Berlin was Rabbi Lase Berlin. The Rabbi and genealogist Eduard Duckesz wrote a "Family History of Rabbi Lase Berlin in Hamburg” (Familiengeschichte des Rabbi Lase Berlin in Hamburg). According to this account, Siegfried Berlin was one of six children of Meir Berlin, a great grandson of Rabbi Lase Berlin, and his wife Malchen, née Holländer. Siegfried’s oldest brother Ivan was killed in an accident in 1901. His second oldest brother, Alexander, born in 1878, acquired a lottery license in Lübeck and started a business of his own with a lottery collection company in Hamburg; his office building was located at Grindelallee 132. He and his wife Frieda, née Heyn, had a son named Erwin Isaak. Siegfried’s brother Eduard, a stonemason, operated a gravestone workshop in Fuhlsbüttel near the Jewish Cemetery, an enterprise that was liquidated in 1938/1939. Eduard Berlin and his wife Fanny, née Meyer, had three children: Ernst, Olga, and Herbert. Siegfried’s sister Frieda, married to the merchant Martin Neuhaus, lived with their three children in the house at Grindelallee 132 as well. Siegfried’s youngest sister, Minna, was married to Richard Meyer, who ran a woolen goods store in Altona at Grosse Bergstrasse 182 a; the family resided next-door in house no. 182.

Eduard Duckesz wrote about Siegfried Berlin, "He was a jeweler, an affectionate son, a good brother, a kind-hearted man. However, due to a tragic accident, he was killed in the prime of life, at the age of 37, at Rosh Hashanah [the Jewish New Year in early fall] of 1920.” His date of death (according to the death certificate) was 12 Sept. 1920, one month before his thirty-sixth birthday. His sister Minna and her husband Richard Meyer took in two-year-old Malchen as a foster child.

Kurt Berlin, two months old when his father died, stayed with his mother. Dora Berlin remarried. Her second husband, the merchant Georg Loschinski, born on 2 Apr. 1891, was a native of the Hohensalza District in what used to be the Prussian Province of Posen, which belonged to Poland under the name of Inowroclaw since the end of World War I. Georg Loschinski came from a Jewish family and his parents were Elias and Rosa Loschinski, née Lewin. After stays in Gelsenkirchen and Münster, he had moved to Quickbornstrasse 32 in Hamburg in 1925.

In 1933, the Loschinski couple relocated with Kurt to the fourth floor of the house at Mörkenstrasse 3 in Altona. Georg Loschinski was the general manager of Hermann F. Piening GmbH, a fish wholesale company at Grosse Elbstrasse 141. From 1937 until 1939, the family lived at Norderstrasse 2, adjacent to Mörkenstrasse. In the very end, Georg Loschinski worked as a "buyer.” According to the entry in his Jewish religious tax (Kultussteuer) file card, he was unemployed starting in 1938.

At that time, 18-year-old Kurt Berlin earned his living as a musician, playing the accordion.

As a Jewish businessman being forced to give up his store, Richard Meyer had to close his company, called "Woll-Meyer,” at the beginning of 1939. In 1940, he moved with his wife and his foster daughter to the house at Grindelallee 134.

As the persecution measures against the Jewish population increased, members of the Berlin family also made efforts to emigrate. Kurt’s sister Malchen hoped to be able to leave the country with the help of a friend who had already emigrated. Kurt’s cousin, Ivan Ernst Berlin, having emigrated to Shanghai in July 1939, applied in vain to the relevant authorities for an entry permit for Malchen Berlin and her foster mother, Minna Meyer. The plans for emigration failed. On the second large-scale transport from Hamburg, comprised of 986 Jews, several members of the Berlin and Loschinski families were deported to the Minsk Ghetto in the capital of German-occupied Belarus. The names of Georg and Dora Loschinski and Kurt Berlin were entered on the list for this "evacuation” to Minsk on 8 Nov. 1941. Their last place of residence was Werderstrasse 65 in Harvestehude with Wolff. Also on this transport were Kurt‘s cousin Erwin Berlin and his wife Ilse, who had volunteered for the transport to Minsk together with daughter Hildegard, as well as Kurt‘s aunt, Frieda Neuhaus, née Berlin, her husband Martin Neuhaus, and daughter Ilse with her husband, Wolf Cohen.

None of them returned. Those that had survived the hunger, the cold, and the infectious diseases in the Minsk Ghetto were murdered in one of the mass shootings taking place in the ghetto in 1943.

Minna Meyer was deported along with Kurt’s sister Malchen to Riga on 6 Dec. 1941. Together with them, Kurt’s aunt Fanny Berlin, née Meyer, and their daughter Olga Wolf, née Berlin, with her two-year-old son Dan had to set out on the journey to their deaths. Minna and Malchen Berlin were deported further to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig (today Gdansk in Poland) in Oct. 1944, where they perished.

Anna Sacharewitz, Dora Loschinski’s mother who had emigrated to the Netherlands, was deported on 4 Dec. 1942 from the Westerbork transit camp to Auschwitz and murdered there.

At Grindelallee 134, Wrangelstrasse 17, at Eppendorfer Baum 10, and at Gneisenaustrasse 10, Stolpersteine are located to commemorate the relatives of Kurt Berlin.


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

Stand: April 2018
© Birgit Gewehr

Quellen: 1; 2 (R 1940/358 Malchen Berlin); 4; 5; 8; StaH 5221 Jüdische Gemeinden, 992 e 2 Band 2 (Deportationsliste Minsk, 8.11.1941); StaH 351-11 Amt für Wiedergutmachung, 6912 (Meyer, Minna), 5704 (Meyer, Richard) und 31590 (Berlin, Erwin Isaak); StaH 332-5 Standesämter, 8061 (Eintrag Nr. 370, Berlin); Duckesz, Familiengeschichte; Auskunft von Johann-Hinrich Möller, Stolperstein-Initiative Hamburg, zu Familie Berlin aus Gesprächen von Hinne Möller mit Ursula Hosse, Kusine von Kurt Berlin, Februar 2006, aus der Korrespondenz im August 2006, aus dem Briefwechsel der Familie Berlin (1939–1941) im Bestand Margarethe und Susan Berlin, San Rafael CA, USA; Korrespondenz mit Cornelia von Schöders, Urenkelin von Anna Sacharewitz, Juni 2014; Johann-Hinrich Möller, Biographie von Malchen Berlin, in: www.stolpersteine-Hamburg.de/de, Zugriff 11.8.2014; Susanne Lohmeyer, Biographien für Erwin, Ilse und Hildegard Berlin, in: Lohmeyer, Stolpersteine, S. 90 f. und S. 78 f.; Biographien für Frieda, Ilse, Hildegard, Kurt, Malchen, Erwin und Fanny Berlin befinden sich auf www.Stolpersteine-Hamburg.de.
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