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Franziska Rosenbaum (née Hesse) * 1879

Isestraße 65 (Eimsbüttel, Harvestehude)

1941 Lodz
ermordet

further stumbling stones in Isestraße 65:
Alice Goldstein, Rosa Josias, Willy Josias, Margarethe Rosenbaum

Franziska Rosenbaum, née Hesse, born on 13 Nov. 1879, deported on 25 Oct. 1941 to Lodz
Margarethe Rosenbaum, born on 31 July 1903, deported on 25 Oct. 1941 to Lodz

The mother and daughter moved from Duderstadt near Hannover to Isestrasse in Hamburg in 1939. They had been harassed in their hometown by local members of the Nazi party and forced to sell their business. Since 1866, the Rosenbaum family owned a textiles store in Duderstadt on Marktstrasse, the "S. Rosenbaum” Company, which sold mostly fashionable women’s clothes and dress materials as well as men’s clothes and suit material. The daughter of the former neighbor across Marktstrasse, Irmgard Gödike, remembered: "Since the Rosenbaums had very high-quality goods and did not overcharge customers, many families bought the entire trousseau for their daughters there. The Rosenbaums were the trousseau store in town.”

The Rosenbaum family was comprised of the mother, Franziska, the father, Max, born in 1868, and their four children: Hans, born in 1902, Margarethe, born in 1903, Ernst, born in 1908, who would later call himself Ernest Ralston, and Paul, born in 1915. Paul died of a head-injury in 1932 at the age of 17.

During questioning in connection with the "restitution proceedings” in 1967, the son’s Ernst lawyer provided the following information:
"The household in Duderstadt included a seven or eight room apartment (living room, dining room, new study, three bedrooms, a girl’s room, as well as, perhaps, a guestroom) with a large library (about 25 shelf meters [82 ft] of books), well provided with table linens and undergarments, silverware, porcelain, crystal ware, and oil paintings (originals!). In addition, the testatrix owned a very wide range of valuable clothing and a Persian lamb coat.”

Except for son Hans, who emigrated to Johannesburg in South Africa early on, all family members worked in the company. In addition, three sales assistants and two female tailors were employed there as well. Located adjacent to store premises, on the second floor facing the courtyard, were a dressmaker’s studio, and on the third floor a large warehouse containing fabrics and bed feathers. The business flourished. However, the year 1933 already ushered in changes: The witness Irmgard Gödike stated that her parents observed how a large swastika was "smeared” on to the store entrance. SS and SA members checked who was shopping at the Rosenbaums.’

Nevertheless, many Duderstadt residents were not deterred, shopping there secretly. In particular, Catholic farmers from the rural environs, who were in passive opposition to the Nazis, brought their feathers to the Rosenbaums for sale, in return purchasing new clothes for themselves.

In Jan. 1935, Max Rosenbaum passed away. The mother continued to operated the textiles business, together with her younger son Ernst working as merchant and her daughter Margarethe as a sales clerk.

Even in 1936, when an SA man began taking up a permanent position in front of the store entrance, many farmers continued to buy from the Rosenbaums, even though overall fewer customers came than in the previous years. Consequently, Franziska Rosenbaum went by car across the countryside to the villages in order to call on their long-standing customers, and in the course of these trips, entire families would stock up on clothes. With great skill, the Rosenbaums thus managed to maintain their sales despite the repressive measures of the SA.

Only the actions of the SS and SA during the night of the November Pogrom of 1938 eventually forced the Rosenbaums to give up their business. Ernst was arrested on 9 November and detained in the Duderstadt prison for three weeks. Uniformed SA and SS men from Duderstadt and Göttingen smashed in all of the windows of the Rosenbaums’ store and private residence that same evening, and the following morning, they began to ransack the store and the warehouse.

The sales clerk of the Rosenbaums, Erika Bögershausen, remembered: "Large furniture moving vans had pulled up, with their openings facing the shop windows, and they were loaded with the stocks on hand. When I set foot on the store from a back entrance a short time afterward, I noticed that the furnishings had been destroyed; among other things, the lighting fixtures had been shot to pieces, the floorboards torn up, and the safe deposit box forced open. … The warehouse located on the third floor had also been plundered and destroyed, respectively. The bed feathers were all poured out of the windows, which rendered the space in front of the building completely white.”

Fritz Wagner, responsible for taking inventory at the Rosenbaums’ and residing across the street from the warehouse of the National Socialist People’s Welfare authority (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt – NSV) on Jüdensstrasse, observed how SS men carried the plundered stocks from the furniture moving vans into the NSV building.

Five days after the act of violence, Franziska Rosenbaum offered her property and the business for sale. The Werners, a non-Jewish watchmaker couple, purchased the real estate. Only half a year later, the Duderstadt Gestapo commissioned the representative of the textiles and trade association, Otto Morick, with selling the plundered textiles and with depositing the proceeds into blocked accounts of the aggrieved parties. He made the following statement:

"When I came to the NSV to pick up the goods, the individual lots were in a total jumble, which meant one could not identify … which goods were from the Rosenbaums. I learned that some of the items, such as net curtains, towels, and bed linens had been given away to children’s homes and that the NSDAP [the Nazi party] had removed red ticking to use as wall coverings for Nazi festivities …”

Since the goods were robbed from several stores, the former company owners had to help Otto Morick to identify the goods, sorting them on separate tables. Ernst Rosenbaum took on this task on behalf of his family. Of the value of the inventory estimated at 30,000 RM (reichsmark), 7,435.50 RM were transferred to a blocked account of the Rosenbaums with the Genossenschaftsbank following the sale of the remaining stocks on hand. Like all German Jews, soon afterward Franziska Rosenbaum was forced to pay an asset-based "levy on Jewish assets” ("Judenvermögensabgabe”) of 8,000 RM to the German Reich for damages incurred during "Crystal Night” ("Reichskristallnacht”), the November Pogrom of 1938. In Dec. 1938, Jews had to surrender their driver’s licenses. Franziska Rosenbaum sold her car to the Werners, who had already taken over the business. In Mar. 1939, Ernst Rosenbaum emigrated via London to the USA, with his mother covering payment of 1,820 RM in "Reich flight tax” ("Reichsfluchtsteuer”) for him.

In the summer of 1939, Franziska and Margarethe Rosenbaum moved from Duderstadt to Isestrasse in Hamburg; the Heine GmbH moving company based in Hannover took care of transporting the moving goods. They then resided as subtenants with the Jewish Kuh couple. The two women lived of the remaining assets that the foreign currency had allocated to them to a limited extent. If they needed any funds in addition to the meager monthly allowance, they were forced to file applications to the foreign currency office of the Chief Finance Administrator (Oberfinanzpräsident). These were mostly doctor’s bills, radiotherapy, and expenses for office supplies and postage, for the foreign currency office urged Franziska Rosenbaum to ask meticulously all debtors from Duderstadt to pay their debts, even though the Rosenbaums themselves were not even allowed to dispose of the collected funds any longer.

Margarethe Rosenbaum intended to emigrate to the USA like her brother Ernst. Therefore, she took English lessons with Dora Krogmann on Innocentiastrasse on a regular basis.

In Nov. 1940, the daughter and mother moved once again, from Isestrasse to a "Jews’ house” ("Judenhaus”) at Haynstrasse 7, ground floor on the left side. They had all of the furniture they were unable to set up there put in storage with Keim, Krauth & Co. In Apr. 1941, Margarethe Rosenbaum made futile phone calls regarding her emigration to the USA. At the beginning of October, she paid the last invoice for English lessons.

On 25 Oct. 1941, the mother and daughter received the deportation order to Lodz, where the two were quartered at Blattbindergasse 7. Since they did not find any work, they had to starve like many other ghetto occupants.

On 2 May 1942, Franziska Rosenbaum filed a petition to the "resettlement commission” ("Aussiedlungskommission”) on Fischgasse. In it she asked, both for herself as a person suffering from a heart condition” and for her daughter as an indispensable caregiver, to be exempted from the impending "resettlement.” Her application was turned down. "ODMOWA” – "Refused” – read the stamp on her application file. In May 1942, the two were, like most other Hamburg Jews from the Lodz Ghetto, suffocated in gas vans in the Chelmno extermination camp.


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

Stand: October 2018
© Maike Grünwaldt

Quellen: 1; 2; 4; 8; StaH, 351-11, AfW 4299, (in dieser Akte sind die Zeugenaussagen im Rahmen des Ge­richtsverfahrens vor dem Landgericht Hannover enthalten); USHMM, RG 15083, M 300/522-523; Bruno Blau, Das Ausnahmerecht für die Juden in Deutschland, Düsseldorf 1965, S. 56; Beate Meyer (Hrsg.), Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der Hamburger Juden 1933–1945, Hamburg 2006, S. 51.
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