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Walter Mittelbach im Alter von ca. 32 Jahren
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Walter Mittelbach * 1909

Moorreye 94 (Hamburg-Nord, Langenhorn)

HIER WOHNTE
WALTER MITTELBACH
JG. 1909
IM WIDERSTAND
VERHAFTET 6.12.1942
"JUDENHILFE"
1943 GEFÄNGNIS KRAKAU
1943 DACHAU
HINGERICHTET 29.7.1944
GEFÄNGNIS KRAKAU

Walter Mittelbach, born 5.3.1909 in Hamburg, arrested on 6.12.1942 in Krakow, imprisonment in various prisons and concentration camps, sentenced to death by the Special Court in Krakow on 22.2.1944, executed on 29.7.1944 in Krakow

Moorreye 94

Walter Mittelbach was born in Hamburg on March 5, 1909. His parents, Magda Boya, née Möller (born 5.4.1877), and his father Carl Ludwig Mittelbach (born 18.12.1869), came from Hamburg and had married there on 29 November 1902. With his four siblings Ernst Friedrich Ludwig (born 31.12.1903), Gertrud (born 6.11.1904), Hans Eugen Hermann (born 12.10.1905) and Joachim (born 20.12.1906), Walter Mittelbach grew up as the youngest in their common birthplace. Initially, the family lived at Eppendorfer Baum 42, then at Grindelberg 15. When Walter was four years old, they moved to Klein Borstel. There, at Struckholt 19, they lived for ten years, until they subsequently lived for twelve years in the neighboring district of Fuhlsbüttel, Rübenhofstraße 12.

The family moved into their own home in Langenhorn on the border to Fuhlsbüttel, a semi-detached house at Moorreye 94, in 1936. It was the house of the house broker Moritz Traugott, who had it built in 1928 for his daughter Hedwig on the occasion of her wedding on the property of the Eigenheim-Baugesellschaft Siemershöhe m.b.H.. The Jewish Traugott family, persecuted during the National Socialist era, had to sell the house; they escaped with their two sons via Sweden to the USA. The daughter Hedwig, née Traugott, who was married to the non-Jewish teacher Paul Schmüser, remained in Hamburg and survived with her two daughters.

Walter Mittelbach's father Carl Mittelbach was a secondary school teacher and taught art, among other things, at the seminary school for girls in Hohenfelde, Angerstraße 7. Painting was his passion. Later, Walter Mittelbach's wife, or rather his daughter Renate Petra, said that the whole family was musically talented. Each of the children could play an instrument. House concerts were an integral part of family life. Walter's brother Joachim attended the Matthias-Claudius-Gymnasium in Wandsbek. Walter Mittelbach was technically very gifted and became an engineer.

He is said to have been active in horticulture before the war and to have designed several gardens in Wellingsbüttel, such as that of the teacher couple Carl and Margarethe Westerkamp at Wellingsbütteler Landstraße 42 during the period of unemployment. He felt particularly at home there, and their children Hanna and Karl enjoyed playing with him in the garden. Margarethe Westerkamp liked the way Walter Mittelbach could easily defy conventions. The entire Mittelbach family is said to have been very fun-loving and creative and understood how to "conjure" something sensible out of awkward situations.

Walter Mittelbach's wife recalled an outing during the time of their engagement. Walter had assembled a functional machine from two defective motorcycles and then invited her to go on a tour. Behind Wedel, however, the engine had gone out and Walter had said, "Now we have to push." They had no more money for gasoline and had to walk back to the Schlump. Since then, Walter would not have been able to persuade his future wife to go on a motorcycle trip together. Walter Mittelbach's character is remembered as always friendly and very helpful. He had energetically helped elderly neighbors in the house of his parents-in-law in Rosenstraße/ Sternschanze several times and carried the coal from the cellar to the fourth floor.

After a period of unemployment, his fiancée, the down-to-earth Liselott, suggested that he take up a career as a civil servant and register with the Reichsbahn (German railroad). Walter Mittelbach then applied there as an engineer and got a job as technical Reichsbahn secretary on March 1, 1938. As can be seen from notes in his personnel file (presumably dated February 9, 1939), Walter Mittelbach belonged to the SPD from June to the end of September 1931 and was not a member of the NSDAP, with his additional statement "will apply for admission to the party as soon as it is open" (this referred to the fact that the NSDAP had decreed an entry ban on April 19, 1933 due to the mass influx, which was relaxed in the meantime but finally lifted only on May 10, 1939).
Walter Mittelbach's brother Ernst was proposed in September 1938 for the position of senior commercial teacher. However, the school administration regretted that he was not a member of the NSDAP.

Shortly before the beginning of the war, on July 27, 1939, Walter Mittelbach married his fiancée Liselott Käthe, née Emde (born 19.10.1919) in Hamburg. As a feast there was only one chicken for six people. A wedding cake could not be prepared; the groom merely painted it on a cardboard box.

In the same year, Walter Mittelbach's sister Gertrud also married Werner Jorre on November 11, 1939. He was a plant manager in an armaments factory.

Walter Mittelbach, "Technical Reichsbahn Secretary” in the service of the Reichsbahndirektion, was seconded to the Reichsbahndirektion Krakow four days later, on November 15, 1939, where he was employed in the technical office. In August 1941, daughter Renate Petra was born in Hamburg.

In the same year, Walter Mittelbach's brother Hans was drafted into military service. According to the surviving eyewitness account of her granddaughter Petra, her mother Magda Mittelbach is said to have listened to "enemy radio" with the professor who lived in the left-hand duplex at Moorreye 96 (Prof. Dr. jur. et phil. K. Sewering).

Walter Mittelbach's employment with the Reichsbahn was terminated on January 27, 1943, because of his arrest. He had been reported by the Neu Sandez security police for "deliberately freeing resettled Jews from the Deblin camp" and "smuggling them across the border".

On December 17, 1943, arrest warrants were issued against the Walter Mittelbach and the drilling inspector Karl Müller (born 2.4.1889 in Rotenburg) from Grünberg. According to the report of the Neu Sandez security police, they were already in pre-trial detention in the "German Penal Institution Krakow," Wirsingstraße 3, and were: "urgently suspected in December 1942, in Deblin and Muszyna, of jointly
1.) as people's pests, of violating the regulations issued on the basis of the decree of 13.09.1940 on residence restrictions in the G. G. [Generalgouvernement] on the residence of Jews,
2.) to have issued false documents for the purpose of deception in legal transactions and to have used them.
3.) to have intentionally liberated resettled Jews from the Deblin camp."

From December 6, 1942 until February 1943, Walter Mittelbach was imprisoned in the Neu-Sandez prison. He was then transferred to the notorious Krakow Montelupich Prison - until April 1943. Prisoners of this prison were regularly shot in retaliation for partisan actions. On June 5, 1943, Walter Mittelbach was registered as a "protective prisoner" in the Dachau concentration camp or Friedrichshafen subcamp under prisoner number 48261, as was his co-defendant, the carpenter Karl Müller, Protestant, prisoner number 48260.

The Zeppelin factory in Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance maintained its own labor detachment of the Dachau concentration camp there; the associated Friedrichshafen labor camp was located on the company grounds of the Zeppelin shipyard. Between June 1943 and September 1944, approximately 1200 concentration camp prisoners from Dachau were located there. On October 28, 1943, the entry "transferred" was made in the access book for Walter Mittelbach and Karl Müller. This presumably meant that they had been transferred back to Krakow, for the start of the trial.

Walter Mittelbach's brother Ernst Mittelbach (see his biography www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de) was serving time at the same time in the Hamburg-Stadt remand prison and wrote to his wife on June 13, 1943: "Many thanks for Lotte's greeting. Give her my best regards again, and give my warmest regards to Walter." It can be assumed that Ernst knew about Walter's arrest.

The special court in Krakow, Bonerstraße 9, sentenced Walter Mittelbach to death on February 22, 1944. For the long months until his execution on July 29, 1944, he was again imprisoned in Montelupich Prison in Krakow. Walter Mittelbach's letters, which he was able to write to Hamburg, reveal that he was always concerned about his family and tried to give hope to others, as on November 28, 1943. He had just returned to Krakow from Friedrichshafen and encouraged his "Lottchen" to believe in a brighter, happier time for them both. He encouraged her: "Yes, you are ten times right when you give our Petra a free education. In later life, the little one will thank you for it. Of course, it is very difficult to find the right way. In no case the child should obey blindly without own will, but the parents have to adjust in their views and views to the mentality of the children. One notices nevertheless where the schoolmaster blood inherited over generations rolls e.g. Mesterkamp. How easily the woman can cope with her two rods and how sensibly the children are brought up."

Here Walter Mittelbach alluded to the friendly teacher couple Westerkamp. He writes, as if in passing, that the last year and a half had cost him something of his health and his nerves, of his dental problems, that he regrets not having done anything about them in Dachau, that he had to deal with his "head story", "one helps oneself by sending powder, no one can help one. But all that is less important, the main thing is that you keep your health."

In his letter on his mother's birthday, the last to her, he still tried to spread hope, but also stood firmly by his position.
"Krakow, 5.4.1944.
First of all, congratulations on your birthday today. Hopefully, you will still be able to spend this day quite often in a somewhat happier and better time in the best of health. Thank you very much for your letter, you are mistaken if you think I am complaining or lamenting my fate. No and again no, I do not feel like a criminal, I have done nothing. I just don't expect anything from today, at least nothing good. It must be a consolation to you that if I should be murdered (just like Lott) that in these years every minute an innocent person must lose his life. I am then also a victim of this insanity. By the way it is not yet so far and the war goes also finally once to end, in any case the events in the east let conclude on an imminent end. So also for you head high and now just the riffraff shown that you have more character than the whole union.
Best wishes and kisses from your son Walter".

Walter Mittelbach wrote his last letter to his wife Liselott in Krakow on July 28, 1944:
"Kr. the 28.7.44.
My dear Lottchen
Very briefly, I would like to tell you once again what will happen to me now. In all probability, we will now first of all be taken to Central Germany, from there we will then be brought to or near our birthplaces. So my darling, do not worry even if you do not hear from me in the next 8 weeks, for the time being nothing will happen. When I am in Hbg, I will be able to see further, especially to get in touch with the lawyer myself. I also hope that everything will turn out well. The main thing is that you stay healthy for me, you know that you are everything to me and I don't like to live without you. So, my dear, I hope that when this misfortune with the transport is over, you and I will be able to see each other again. Otherwise I have not received any news from you in the last 4 weeks Krakow is being completely evacuated. So, my little Lottchen, hold your head high and do not lose your courage and faith that everything will change for the better. Despairing in this situation has no sense and only destroys the so urgently needed health. Heartfelt greetings and a thousand kisses to you and Petra from your ever-loving Walter.”

This letter appeared very late. His wife learned only half a year after his execution, after laborious research - it was war and chaotic conditions prevailed as far as information was concerned - that a sentence had been carried out. She never saw the sentence. No grave site of Walter Mittelbach is known.

Walter Mittelbach had probably not learned of the execution of his brother Ernst a month earlier. Ernst Mittelbach had been executed on June 26, 1944, at the Holstenglacis remand prison. He was buried at Ohlsdorf Cemetery on July 3, 1944 by the Anatomy Department, grave location Bl 71, row 79, no. 26. On November 11, 1958, his remains were reburied at the International War Gravesite, grave location Bp 74, row 39, no. 15. His name is still a reminder of him there today.

The further fate of the family members
The family of Walter Mittelbach's sister Gertrud Jorre, née Mittelbach, was also affected by political persecution. Her husband Werner Jorre, a plant manager in an armaments factory, was imprisoned in the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp in 1943. He had given shelter to political refugees. After his release, he was sent to the Eastern Front with a Gestapo note. It was not until the fall of 1948 that he returned to Hamburg from four years of Soviet captivity. In the meantime, Gertrud Jorre and her two small children were supported by her brother Hans Mittelbach.

Walter Mittelbach's wife Liselott Mittelbach had lived in Wandsbek at Oktaviastraße 17 since July 1942. After the war, around 1946, she returned to Hamburg's north. First she lived at Wellingsbüttler Landstraße 42 with the teacher couple Westerkamp, who still felt very close to Walter Mittelbach. Margarethe Westerkamp was the godmother of their daughter Renate Petra, evacuated from Hamburg at that time, had gone to live with her maternal grandparents in Winsen (Luhe). From 1961, mother and daughter lived together again, in Fuhlsbüttel, Heschredder 4.

Walter Mittelbach's niece Margret Horn, the daughter of his brother Ernst Mittelbach, wrote about this: "Lotte found a life partner after the death of her husband and they lived [...] in the postwar apartment at Woll-Schuster in Fuhlsbüttel."

Walter Mittelbach's parents not only suffered from the loss of their two executed sons, they had also lost their son Joachim Mittelbach in World War II. He remained missing as a member of the Wehrmacht in Slovakia. Magda Mittelbach commented on this pain in November 1950: "I believe that what was done to me is unique to Hamburg. What I have gone through is much worse for me as a mother than if I had been personally imprisoned or killed. [...] The murder of my two sons has completely broken me physically and emotionally. Therefore I can no longer get out of medical treatment."

Magda Mittelbach died on November 23, 1955, and according to her husband Carl Mittelbach, her death was "directly related to the heart condition caused by Nazi persecution." After cremation, her urn was buried on December 7, 1955, at Ohlsdorf Cemetery in the family grave of her father, teacher Johann Friedrich Möller, created in 1886, grave location U 18, No. 29/30/II.

Carl Mittelbach went blind and lived to be almost 99 years old. He passed away in Hamburg-Altona on September 25, 1968.

Walter's surviving siblings died a few years after; Gertrud Jorre at age 67 on January 18, 1972 in Hamburg-Altona and brother Hans on August 1, 1978 at age 74. Their urns were interred after cremation in the grave plot next to their parents, U 18, No. 29 II, and U 18, No. 29 III/2.

Liselott Mittelbach, always cared for by her daughter Renate Petra, still experienced her 100th birthday together with her, her grandchildren and many guests in Reinbek. She had guarded her husband's last letters from prison all her life; her daughter was able to see them only shortly before the end of her mother's life.

Translation Beate Meyer

Stand: March 2023
© Margot Löhr

Quellen: StaH, 332-5 Standesämter, Geburtsregister, 14183 u. 72/1903 Ernst Mittelbach, 14188 u. 2956/1904 Gertrud Mittelbach, 14529 u. 2431/1905 Hans Mittelbach, 14609 u. 3208/1906 Joachim Mittelbach, 113669 u. 559/1909 Walter Mittelbach; StaH, 332-5 Standesämter, Heiratsregister, 8618 u. 641/1902 Carl Mittelbach u. Magda, geb. Möller; Mittelbach; StaH, 332-5 Standesämter, Sterberegister, 1203 u. 743/1944 Ernst Mittelbach, 5522 u. 1897/1968 Carl Mittelbach, 8457 u. 528/1955 Magda Mittelbach, Mittelbach, 7468 u. 3578/1971 Johann Carl Jorre, 5538 u. 137/1972 Gertrud Jorre, 1510 u. 1466/1978 Hans Jorre; StaH, 351-11 Amt für Wiedergutmachung, 1239 Magda Mittelbach, 1379 Carl Mittelbach, 34328 Walter Mittelbach, 42995 Liselott Mittelbach, 43040 Käte Mittelbach, 47147 Ernst Mittelbach; StaH, A 576/001, 1818/19, Hamburger Lehrerverzeichnis; Archiv Friedhof Ohlsdorf, Beerdigungsregister, Feuerbestattungen, Nr. F 7558/1955 Magda Mittelbach, Nr. 472/1972 Gertrud Jorre, Nr. F 3057/1978 Hans Mittelbach, Grabbrief Nr. 3458/1886; Auskünfte Heinz Fehlauer, BArch, VVN (DY 55/V 24 1/7/61); Komitee Verfolgte des Naziregimes, Entschädigungsakten; Auskünfte Albert Knoll, Archiv KZ Gedenkstätte Dachau, NARA Zugangsbuch Nr. 113/048210; Manuskript zu Walter Mittelbach, August 2008; Margret Horn, Die Familie Mittelbach, 1992; Ignatz Bubis (mit Peter Sichrovsky): "Damit bin ich noch längst nicht fertig". Die Autobiographie, Frankfurt am Main/New York 1996; Ignatz Bubis: "Ich bin ein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens". Ein autobiographisches Gespräch mit Edith Kohn, Köln 1993; Andreas Seeger/Fritz Treichel: Hinrichtungen in Hamburg und Altona 1933–1944. "In einer schlagkräftigen Strafrechtspflege müssen Todesurteile unverzüglich vollstreckt werden", Hamburg 1998; Klaus Timm: Die Ermordung des Lehrer Ernst Mittelbach, Hamburg 2006, S. 68; Gefängnis Monte Lupich, http://pl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plik:Bundesarchiv_Bild_121-0316,_Krakau,_Gef%C3%A4ngnis_Montelupich,_H%C3%A4ftling.jpg&filetimestamp=20081209150646, eingesehen am: 4.4.2022; Bubis – im "Schindler-Lager, http://www.luebeck-kunterbunt.de/TOP100/Ignatz_Bubis.htm, eingesehen am: 26.5.2022. Dank an Klaus Timm, Holger Tilicki, und Renate Petra Puls!