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Selma Horwitz (née Levy) * 1877

Haynstraße 32 (Hamburg-Nord, Eppendorf)

HIER WOHNTE
SELMA HORWITZ
GEB. LEVY
JG. 1877
DEPORTIERT 1941
LODZ / LITZMANNSTADT
ERMORDET 13.7.1942

further stumbling stones in Haynstraße 32:
Joseph Levy, Bertha Strauss

Joseph (Josef) Levy, born on 15.4.1872 in Rodenberg (district of Schaumburg/ Lower Saxony), murdered in the Brandenburg an der Havel killing center on 23.9.1940
Selma Horwitz, née Levy (Levi), born March 24, 1877 in Rodenberg (district of Schaumburg/ Lower Saxony), deported to Lodz (Litzmannstadt ghetto) on Oct. 25, 1941, died there on July 13, 1942
Berta (Bertha) Strauß, née Levy, born 16.3.1879 in Rodenberg (district of Schaumburg/ Lower Saxony), deported on 25.10.1941 to Lodz (Litzmannstadt ghetto), murdered there

Haynstrasse 32 (Eppendorf)

Joseph Levy was born in Rodenberg (district of Schaumburg/ Lower Saxony) on April 15, 1872, he was the oldest of six children. In later official documents his first name was sometimes spelled "Josef". He was the child of the lumber merchant Benjamin Levy, born on April 13, 1839 in Rodenberg, and his wife Händel, called Helene in documents, née Goldschmidt, born on August 26, 1841 in Gehrden in the Calenberger Land in the region of Hanover. Both parents were Jewish.

Also born in Rodenberg were sisters Friederike, born August 14, 1873, Clara, born May 7, 1875, Selma, born March 24, 1877, and Berta (Bertha), born March 16, 1879. In the 1880s, the Levy family moved from Rodenberg to Hanover. There, the sixth child, Sophie, was born on June 20, 1883.

Joseph Levy attended the Gymnasium, but had to leave school in the Tertia because of insufficient performance. It is possible that a febrile illness during several weeks of childhood had an effect, which may have led to an impairment of his learning ability.

During the military service he performed in Alsace, doctors diagnosed a "mental deficiency" that led to his military discharge and, at the turn of the century, to incapacitation in Hanover. Joseph Levy did not learn a trade. He is said to have been occasionally employed by relatives as a clerk. In 1900 he left his parents' home in Hanover and moved to Bad Rehburg in the south of the present-day district of Nienburg/ Weser.

On April 27, 1900, the father of the family, Benjamin Levy, died. In that year, the daughter Selma Levy married the merchant Julius (Jehuda) Horwitz and moved to Hamburg to join her husband, where he was the owner of a commercial agency.

After Selma's move to Hamburg, the Levy household in Hanover consisted only of Helene Levy and her daughters Berta and Sophie, and possibly also Clara. However, we do not know. Berta also left Hanover after marrying the merchant Salo Bloch from Osnabrück in 1908. Friederike had married Neumann Freidberg, born in 1867 in Wolkowiski (today partly located on Belarusian and Polish territory).

After several moves, mother Helene and her daughter Sophie had settled at Rambergstraße 16. Joseph Levy also stayed there for a week in 1917. It is not known where he had stayed until then and where he stayed in the following years.

On September 7, 1921, Joseph Levy was admitted for the first time to an institution at the behest of his Hanoverian guardian, namely to the Eckardtsheim psychiatric hospital near Bielefeld, which belonged to the "von Bodelschwinghsche Anstalten Bethel" (today: v. Bodelschwinghsche Stiftungen Bethel). We do not know the reason for his incapacitation and his placement in an institution. As Joseph Levy stated in Eckardtsheim, he had lived in Hamburg in the time before his admission, i.e. near his sister Selma Horwitz. This information was to become significant for the later dispute about the assumption of the home costs for Joseph Levy. The home's management wanted Joseph Levy to be discharged as soon as possible, because the Ophra House of the Eckardtsheim Institution was to be reserved for its original purpose, the care of "weak epileptics".

The management of the institution sought to have Joseph Levy admitted to an "institution for the feeble-minded" outside Bethel. The years in Eckhardtsheim were therefore marked by constant written discussions between the home's management and Joseph Levy's guardian about the amount of the institution's costs and the question of who should pay for them. Joseph Levy had owned securities worth 16,700 Reichsmarks in 1922, but this small fortune had become worthless in the course of the inflation of 1923. Joseph Levy's mother, who as the only relative could also have been called upon to pay, was herself dependent on contributions from her daughters.

The welfare associations of Hanover and Hamburg, which were eligible to assume the costs, tried for years to prevent the possible additional burden on their budgets. Finally, the Eckardtsheim institution threatened Joseph Levy's dismissal several times. On June 4, 1925, the news finally came from Hamburg that Joseph Levy could be transferred to a Hamburg institution.
One day later, on June 5, 1925, Joseph Levy drove to the Hanseatic city accompanied by a nurse and was admitted to the Friedrichsberg State Hospital. On August 7, 1928, he was transferred to the Langenhorn State Hospital. In February 1935 - presumably as part of the restructuring of Hamburg's institutional landscape to the detriment of patients in need of special care under the so-called Friedrichsberg-Langenhorn Plan - he was placed in the Hamburg-Farmsen nursing home for the next five and a half years.

In the spring/ summer of 1940, the "euthanasia" headquarters in Berlin, Tiergartenstraße 4, planned a special action against Jews in public and private sanatoriums and nursing homes. It had the Jewish people living in the institutions registered and rounded up in so-called collective institutions. The Hamburg-Langenhorn sanatorium and nursing home was designated as the North German collective institution. All institutions in Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg were ordered to transfer the Jews living in their institutions there by September 18, 1940.

Joseph Levy arrived in Langenhorn on September 18, 1940. On September 23, 1940, he and another 135 patients from asylums in northern Germany were transported to Brandenburg at river Havel. The transport reached the Märkish city on the same day. In the part of the former penitentiary that had been converted into a gas killing facility, the patients were immediately herded into the gas chamber and murdered with carbon monoxide. Only one patient, Ilse Herta Zachmann, initially escaped this fate (see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de).

It is not known whether and, if so, when relatives became aware of Joseph Levy's death. In all documented communications it was claimed that the murdered Jewish patient concerned had died in Chelm (Polish) or Cholm (German) east of Lublin. However, those murdered in Brandenburg were never brought to Chelm/ Cholm. The Polish sanatorium that had existed there earlier no longer existed after SS units murdered almost all of the patients on January 12, 1940. There was also no German registry office in Chelm. The invention of the registry office and the use of later than actual death dates served to disguise the murder operation and at the same time to be able to claim boarding costs for a correspondingly longer period of time.

Joseph Levy's mother Helene had died in Hanover on December 14, 1925, at the age of 84. Her daughter Sophie remained in the previous apartment in Hanover at Rambergstraße 16 until 1939 and then moved to Waldstraße 39 for about two years. She was now the last of the Levy family in Hanover and had to endure the increasing discrimination of the Jewish population alone. This may have prompted her to move to Hamburg to join her sister Selma Horwitz on July 25, 1941.

The Hamburg couple Selma and Julius Horwitz had lived at Haynstraße 32 for many years since 1913. They had two sons, Werner Berthold, born on October 14, 1903, and Hans Wolf, born on March 8, 1908. After Julius Horwitz's death on January 17, 1923, Selma initially continued her husband's commercial agency business with her older son Werner Berthold, who lived with her in the large apartment in the Haynstraße. From 1930 onwards, Werner Berthold was no longer able to continue his professional duties. He had been transferred from the Friedrichsberg State Hospital to Langenhorn in April 1933 with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He died there on June 26, 1936.

Hans Wolf Horwitz, Selma Horwitz's younger son, had taken over his brother's role in the parental business in 1930. He had attended the liberal-oriented Wahnschaff private school on Neue Rabenstraße until the upper third in 1923. After completing his apprenticeship, he worked as a salesman in the textile departments of, among others, the trading houses Hermann Tietz (now Alsterhaus), Nagel und Sandern and Cannstadt AG, each in Hamburg, and finally Lindemann & Co in Görlitz.

The involvement of Selma Horwitz's sons in the parental company was also visible in the Hamburg address book. There, "Selma Horwitz widow and children Wwe. u. Kinder" are named as owners for several years. In September 1932, Hans Wolf Horwitz left the company. He returned to work as a salesman, now in the cotton department of the textile stock corporation "Texta" on Großer Burstah Street, where he saw good career prospects for himself. As a result of rampant anti-Semitism, however, the Jewish company lost massive sales and had to lay off employees. The last hired employee, Hans Wolf Horwitz, was the first to lose his job on April 31, 1934.

He now decided to emigrate to Palestine as a farmer and prepared himself for the unfamiliar agricultural work from May 1933 to April 1934 at the Wilhelmshöhe Settlers' School in Blankenese, a Hachshara institution. After that, Hans Wolf Horwitz worked for a farmer until his departure in the fall of 1934. His account of his life in Palestine in the procedure of restitution after the war will be summarized here. Contrary to his plans, Hans Wolf Horwitz initially found work in a store in Haifa for five Palestine pounds a month. This wage was barely enough to support himself. Therefore, he soon worked as a stuart on board the passenger steamer "Tel-Aviv", which belonged to the Palestine Shipping Company Ltd, and later as a provision manager. In 1935 Hans Wolf Horwitz returned to Germany for a short time to marry.

He married Erika Marguerite Derenberg, who had been born in Hamburg on November 4, 1911. She came from a Jewish family that had prospered with a furniture factory and a store on Neuer Wall Street. Shortly after their marriage on September 24, 1935 in Hamburg, Hans Wolf Horwitz now returned to Haifa with his wife.

Hans Wolf's mother Selma Horwitz had remained in Hamburg. In the Hamburg address book she is listed up to and including 1937 at Haynstraße 32, then at Lenhartzstraße 14. In July 1935 her sister Berta had moved in with her. After the death of her first husband Salo Bloch in 1938, she had married the merchant Alfred Strauß from Elberfeld and had since divorced him again. From December 1940, both women lived as subtenants at Isestraße 53 with Jenny Peine.

When Sophie Levy moved from Hanover to Hamburg in July 1941 to join her sisters Selma Horwitz and Berta Strauss, the women lived as subtenants with Charlotte and Robert Salomon Borchardt at Hansastraße 79. Presumably because of the cramped living conditions, Sophie returned to Hanover after only ten days. There she lived at Ellernstraße 16 in a so-called "Judenhaus” and met her widowed sister Friederike (Frieda) Freidberg.

Berta Strauss received a prison sentence of four months in September 1941 "for price violations, misappropriation and unauthorized use of a ration card and purchase of lentils without a ration card." In the trial, a total of eleven people were sentenced to fines starting at RM 80 and prison terms of between two weeks and four months. They had procured oil, lentils, coffee, textile goods (a pair of shirt trousers, a pair of panties, a pair of stockings) among themselves mainly by barter. Berta Strauss was charged with the aggravating circumstance that she had "cheated" herself out of ration coupons.

We do not know whether Berta Strauss still had to serve the sentence, because she, like her sister Selma Horwitz, received the deportation order in October 1941 at Hansastraße 79. Both had to join the transport of 1034 Hamburg residents of Jewish origin, which led to the ghetto "Litzmannstadt" (Łódź) on October 25, 1941.
Selma Horwitz died there under unknown circumstances on July 13, 1942, and Berta probably also perished there.

The further fate of the relatives and the others named:
The above mentioned Hans Wolf and his wife Erika Marguerite Horwitz had their son Uriel in Palestine in 1936. Hans Wolf Horwitz made small transports with a donkey cart. However, he was not able to feed his family from this meager income and in 1939 he began to sell shoes that he had made by Armenian cobblers. Even with this, he was not successful. The earnings did not reach the taxable minimum. When the Armenian cobblers left Haifa together with the Palestinians in 1948, he switched to steel goods. Erika and Hans Wolf Horwitz returned to Hamburg in 1956 with Uriel and ran a laundromat in Bellealliancestraße under the most difficult conditions (for the Derenberg family, see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de (Gustav Derenberg)).

Joseph Levy's sisters Sophie Levy and Friederike (Frieda) Freidberg were deported from Hanover to Riga on December 15, 1941 and murdered.

Berta Strauß's divorced husband Alfred, after emigrating to Belgium, was deported to Auschwitz from Mechelen on September 15, 1942 and murdered.

Nothing is known about Clara Levy's life story. The Theresienstadt victim database lists a Klara Levy, born in Rodenberg on September 7, 1873, who was deported from Berlin to Theresienstadt on July 20, 1942, and further deported to Auschwitz on May 16, 1944. This person could be identical with Clara Levy, so it can be assumed that Clara Levy was murdered in Auschwitz.

Robert Salomon Borchardt, with whom Selma Horwitz was quartered for the last two years, was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto on July 15, 1942. He died there on October 2, 1943 at the age of 74. He is commemorated by a Stolperstein at Eppendorfer Landstraße 14 (biography see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de).

Jenny Peine, with whom Selma Horwitz and Berta Strauss had lodged at Isestraße 53, was sentenced in 1938 by the Hanseatic Special Court to one year and six months in prison for "treachery." She had to serve this sentence in the Fuhlsbüttel women's prison and was then sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. From there, probably as part of the "Special Treatment Action 14f13," she was taken to the Bernburg an der Saale killing facility and murdered on March 18, 1942. Jenny Peine is going to be commemorated by a stumbling stone in front of the house at Isestraße 53.

For Joseph Levy, it is not possible to determine the last freely chosen place of residence, which is usually the place where a Stolperstein is to be laid. Since he lived in Hamburg for a time before 1921 and also visited his sister Selma Horwitz there, the Stolperstein in memory of Joseph Levy is located next to that of his sisters Selma Horwitz at Haynstraße 32.

Stand: September 2022
© Ingo Wille

Quellen: 1; 4; 5; 9; AB; StaH 133-1 III Staatsarchiv III, 3171-2/4 U.A. 4, Liste psychisch kranker jüdischer Patientinnen und Patienten der psychiatrischen Anstalt Langenhorn, die aufgrund nationalsozialistischer "Euthanasie"-Maßnahmen ermordet wurden, zusammengestellt von Peter von Rönn, Hamburg (Projektgruppe zur Erforschung des Schicksals psychisch Kranker in Langenhorn); 213-11 Staatsanwaltschaft Landgericht – Strafsachen 6127 BerthaStrauss u.a.; 213-13 Landgericht Hamburg – Wiedergutmachung 12551 Bertha Strauss, 18106 Bertha Strauss; 332-5 Standesämter 9800 Sterberegister Nr. 57/1923 Julius Horwitz, 9882 Sterberegister Nr. 157/1936 Werner Berthold Horwitz; 351-10 ISozialbehörde I StW 30.11 Bd II; 351-12 I Amt für Wohlfahrtsanstalten 19; 351-11 Amt für Wiedergutmachung 33449 Hans-Wolf Horwitz;352-8/7 Staatskrankenanstalt Langenhorn Abl. 1/1995 Aufnahme-/Abgangsbuch Langenhorn 26. 8. 1939 bis 27. 1. 1941; 352-8/7 Staatskrankenanstalt Langenhorn Abl. 2 1995 Nr. 20051 Werner Horwitz; 522-1 Jüdische Gemeinden 992 e 2 Band 1, 922 e 2 Band 4 Deportationslisten; 731-1 (Handschriftensammlung), Marggraf Kurt, Aus der Geschichte des Pflegeheims Farmsen: Vom Werk- und Armenhaus zum Pflegeheim, Anhang Dk. 21; Landesarchiv Berlin, Standesamt Charlottenburg I, Nr. 1216/1917; UKE/IGEM, Archiv, Patienten-Karteikarte Josef Levy der Staatskrankenanstalt Friedrichsberg; UKE/IGEM, Archiv, Patientenakte Josef Levy der Staatskrankenanstalt Friedrichsberg; Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv Bückeburg, H 179 Nr. 3, Beschneidungsregister der jüdischen Synagoge zu Rodenberg, BS SI 2 Rod 151, Juden in Rodenberg, Auswertung der Register der Synagogengemeinde Rodenberg, darin enthalten: Geburtsregistereintrag vom 15. 4. 1872 Joseph Levy, Geburtsregistereintrag vom 14. 8. 1873, Friederike Levy, Geburtsregistereintrag vom 7. 5. 1875 Clara Levy, Geburtsregistereintrag vom 25. 3. 1877 Selma Levy, Geburtsregistereintrag vom 16. 3. 1879 Bertha Levy; Standesamt Gemeinde Rodenberg, H 179 Geburtsregisterauszug Nr. 29/1875 Clara Levy, Geburtsregisterauszug Nr. 21/1877 Selma Levy, Geburtsregisterauszug Nr. 18/1879 Bertha Levy; Stadtarchiv Hannover, STA Geburtsregisterauszug Nr. 64_2034/1883 Sophie Levy, STA Heiratsregisterauszug Nr. 376_1812/1901 Heiratsregisterauszug Selma Levy/Julius Horwitz, STA Heiratsregisterauszug Nr. 433_2215/1908 Bertha Levy/Salo Bloch, STA Sterberegisterauszug Nr. 1026_2592/1925 Händel, genannt Helene Levy, STA Sterberegisterauszug Nr. 1461/1900 Benjamin Levy, HAB (Hauptarchiv der v. Bodelschwinghschen Stiftung Bethel), Einzelakte Eckardtsheim, 3985 (Josef Levy); Landesarchiv Berlin, Standesamt Charlottenburg I, Sterberegister Nr. 1216/1917 Neumann Freidberg; Stadtarchiv Wuppertal, Heiratsregister Elberfeld Nr. 64/1929 Bertha Bloch geb. Levy/Alfred Strauß. Bundesarchiv, Gedenkbuch, Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933-1945 zu Frieda Freidberg, Selma Horwitz, Clara Klara Levy, Joseph Levy, Berta Bertha Strauß.Schmuhl, Hans-Walter, Bethel – Eckartsheim. Von der Gründung der ersten deutschen Arbeiterkolonie bis zur Auflösung als Teilanstalt (1882 – 2001), Stuttgart 2006. Zu der Familie von Erika Marguerite Derenberg siehe Stolpersteine in der Werderstraße 30 und in der Straße Eppendorfer Baum 21.
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