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Sophie Schoop (née Tisch) * 1875

Poßmoorweg 45 (Hamburg-Nord, Winterhude)

HIER WOHNTE
SOPHIE SCHOOP
GEB. TISCH
JG. 1875
VERHAFTET 1943
DEPORTIERT 1944
AUSCHWITZ
ERMORDET 3.1.1945

Sophie Schoop, née Tisch, born 12/12/1875 in Hamburg, deported to Auschwitz on 1/23/1944, murdered there on 1/3/1945

Sophie Schoop took a stand for others. That led to her undoing.
Sophie Schoop, daughter of Ephraim Tisch and Fanny, née Katzenstein, was a bookkeeper.

She married the merchant Ernst Johann Wilhelm Schoop, born in Hamburg on February 10th, 1872, who had converted to the Jewish faith on May 6th, 1904 for her sake. His parents were Joachim Schoop and Marie, née Lindemann.

Sophie und Ernst Schoop lived at Lagerstrasse 2 in Altona (now Gausstrasse) when their daughter Renate was born on August 8th, 1904.

Renate Schoop absolved training as a sales clerk and worked at an office. She lived in Meerweinstrasse and later at Possmoorweg 45. On March 29th, 1934, she left the Jewish Community and became a Lutheran Protestant. Via the Port of Antwerp in Belgium, she emigrated to United States of America, leaving Antwerp on the Westerland of the Red Star shipping Company on July 23rd, 1938, arriving in New York on August 2nd.

Her parents moved several times; Kohlhöfen 19 and Alsterdorfer Strasse 197 were among their addresses before they moved to Possmoorweg 45 in Winterhude.

The couple lived quite secludedly, so that only their closest neighbors knew that Sophie was Jewish.

Her neighbor Else Rebaum provided us with the following account: When an emergency kitchen was set up in Possmoorweg after the devastating bombing raids of July 1943, Sophie Schoop volunteered to peel potatoes, even though her husband and a few neighbors had warned her. Near the emergency kitchen, there were some barracks where French and Russian POWs were quartered. Sophie Schoop courageously addressed the miserable conditions the prisoners were subject to, and she repeatedly gave them bread and cigarettes. That went well for a time, until some staunch Nazi women from the neighborhood appeared on the scene. Some of the Russians had to help in the kitchen, e.g. carry water. When one of them was severely ranted, Sophie Schoop spontaneously intervened, calling "Russians are humans, too!”

She was immediately reported to the Nazi neighborhood leader. The next morning, August 29th, 1943, the Gestapo came and arrested her. At the time, she had been married to Ernst Schoop for almost 50 years. For weeks, her husband tried to get in information about her whereabouts from the Gestapo. Only by pure chance, Ernst Schoop finally learned that his wife had been taken to the Fuhlsbüttel police prison and was to be deported to Auschwitz without trial. However, there was nothing he could do against it.

On January 23rd, 1944, Sophie Schoop was deported from Fuhlsbüttel to the Auschwitz concentration camp. She received the inmate’s number 74823. A year later, Ernst Schoop received the death certificate of his wife, dated January 3rd, 1945.

After the war, the two women who had reported Sophie Schoop stood trial. They were acquitted "for lack of evidence.”

In 1995, a street named "Sophie-Schoop-Weg" was inaugurated in the new living quarter of Neu-Allermöhe.


Translation by Peter Hubschmid 2018
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: January 2019
© Maike Bruchmann

Quellen: 1; AfW 121275; Ursel Hochmuth/Gertrud Meyer, Streiflichter aus dem Hamburger Widerstand 1933-1945, Berichte und Dokumente, Frankfurt am Main 1980, S. 231–232; Rita Bake, Wer steckt dahinter?, Hamburgs Straßennamen, die nach Frauen benannt sind, Hamburg 2000; Standesamt Hamburg-Altona, Geburtseintrag 744/1904, Renate Schoop; BallinStadt, www.ancestry.de (eingesehen am 06.10.2007); www.jewishgen.org (eingesehen am 11.09.2007).
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