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Paula Weinberg (née Plaut) * 1882

Efeuweg 14 (Hamburg-Nord, Winterhude)

HIER WOHNTE
PAULA WEINBERG
GEB. PLAUT
JG. 1882
DEPORTIERT 1941
RIGA
???

Paula Weinberg, née Plaut, b. 4.12.1882 in Schmalkalden, deported on 12.6.1941 to Riga. Date of death unknown

Efeuweg 14

Paula Weinberg was, next to three brothers, the only daughter of the president of the Jewish Congregation of Schmalkalde, Louis Plaut, and his wife Hannchen, née Heilbronner. In 1903, she married in Hamburg the chief postal inspector Leopold Weinberg, who was also Jewish, and lived with him in Eppendorf at Hegestrasse 13.

The couple had two daughters, Lissy Else (b. 1.3.1904) and Ruth (b. 4.12.1909). The daughters were not brought up in the religion and were consciously not sent to a "Jewish school” by their parents. Paula Weinberg was, however, unlike her husband, a believing Jew and attended in the 1930s, off and on, a synagogue which served the liberal Jewish community on Oberstrasse.

Leopold Weinberg died in 1930; his wife received a widow’s pension and lived now at Efeuweg 14. The daughter Ruth married a Catholic in 1931 and bore a son on 10.7.1935, a Jewish holiday. Her husband sought out Paula Weinberg in the Oberstrasse synagogue in order to give her good news. In the 1940s, Paula Weinberg had, under pressure from the Gestapo, given up her dwelling at Efeuweg 14; she was lodged in Haus Grindelberg 90.

On 6 December 1941, she was with 750 other companions in suffering deported to Riga. As the transport arrived, the SS was shooting the former camp inhabitants "to make room” for the women, men, and children from Hamburg who were led to the nearby Jungfernhof estate. Here they had to spend the night in unheated barns and stalls with wholly inadequate food and in temperatures of minus 22 Fahrenheit. Whoever survived the winter ins such conditions was, with a few exceptions, murdered at the end of March 1942 by the SS.

Paula Weinberg was not among the survivors. At her departure from Hamburg, she had told her daughter Ruth that she should not worry about her, because she had the means to end her life, when it became unbearable. She was declared dead as of 8 May 1945.

Her daughter Lissy Else was able in 1939 to emigrate with her husband Moritz Weinberg (b. 10.5.1895) to England. Her sister Ruth von Bialy agreed to a divorce from her "Aryan” husband, in order to avoid the closing of a mutually owned advertising agency which constituted the basis for the family’s existence. Her husband continued to provide for her and their son. He was, however, in 1941, on account of a disparaging remark about Hitler, jailed in Fuhlsbüttel. Ruth von Bialy had to do forced labor in the 1940s, but survived the persecution because her "half-Jewish” son offered her a certain protection against deportation.


Translator: Richard Levy
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: May 2019
© Ulrike Sparr

Quellen: 1; 4; 5; 8; AfW 030104; FZH/WdE 339; www.alemannia-judaica.de/schmalkalden_synagoge. htm; www.volksbund.de/schon_gelesen/spektrum/riga/deportation.asp; E-Mail von Robert Weinberg (Großneffe), 16.03.2008; Beate Meyer (Hrsg.), Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der Hamburger Juden 1933–1945, Hamburg 2006, S. 64ff; Wolfgang Scheffler und Diana Schulle, Buch der Erinnerung, München 2003, S. 622.
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