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Leo Liebmann Stern * 1858
Maria-Louisen-Straße 120 (Hamburg-Nord, Winterhude)
HIER WOHNTE
LEO LIEBMANN
STERN
JG. 1858
FLUCHT 1938
ITALIEN
USA
further stumbling stones in Maria-Louisen-Straße 120:
Bella Stern
Leo (Liebmann) Stern, born on 14 Feb. 1858 in Breidenbach, fled via Italy and Switzerland to the USA, where he died on 19 Nov. 1943 in New York.
Bella Stern, née Abenheimer, born on 12 Oct. 1867 in Mannheim, fled via Italy and Switzerland to the USA, died there on 6 Sept. 1950 in New York
Maria-Louisen-Strasse 120, Hamburg-Winterhude
Leo Liebmann Stern was born the youngest of six sons of Jacob Stern (1808–1889), a small livestock dealer, in the Hessian community of Breidenbach near Biedenkopf in what is today the District of Marburg. Leo’s mother Rachel (1812–1890), née Baumeister, was the second wife of the previously widowed Jacob, who at times also had a trade working as a butcher and peddling cotton.
Coming from the "very modest” circumstances of a Jewish family, Leo Stern and his older brother Josef (1851–1934) founded the trading company "Gebrüder [Brothers] Stern” for lubricating oils and carriage greases in Cologne at the end of 1880. They steadily expanded this operation into a manufacturing company for industrial greases and oils. During the 1890s, its main production site was relocated to Hamburg’s duty-free port, where the headquarters eventually moved. From 1903, the company did business as "Oelwerke Stern & Sonneborn A.G. Ossag” with headquarters on Kleiner Grasbrook, after the Stern brothers had previously taken a relative from Breidenbach, the financial merchant Jacques Sonneborn, into the management. Leo Stern and his distant cousin Sonneborn built this joint-stock company, still managed by the founders, into a leading German mineral oil company from Hamburg, with branches throughout Europe. During World War I, Stern and Sonneborn continued to expand the company’s position as a wartime supplier to the German army through intensive travel. As early as the 1890s, foreign branches had been established in Paris, London, and Rivarolo near Genoa in Italy.
This enormous entrepreneurial success during the Kaiserreich made Stern, who moved his residence from Cologne to Hamburg in the 1890s (in 1897, he lived at Schlüterstrasse 22 in Hamburg), a wealthy member of Hamburg’s business community. He also joined and financially supported the Jewish religious community. In Jan. 1890, Stern had married in Mannheim his wife Bella, who was born there and belonged to the Abenheimer family of merchants.
In Hamburg, Stern, who came from a moderately conservative family, became a member of the liberal Temple Association (Tempelverband). After 1903, he moved with his family – wife Bella and children Otto (born in 1890) and Erna (born in 1894), who were still born in Cologne, as well as sons Walter (born in 1898) and Paul (born in 1901), who were born in Hamburg – into the newly built urban villa at Leinpfad 6 on the banks of the Alster in Winterhude. The villa had been designed "with elaborate building decoration” according to plans by architect Alfred Löwengard. The prestigious mansion, today under heritage protection and home to the Japanese consulate, was an expression of Stern’s self-confidence as a successful German entrepreneur in the "founding period” (Gründerzeit) of the Kaiserreich, who, after beginnings in the trading city of Cologne, had led family-operated industrial production toward success in the Hanseatic city of Hamburg as well.
Stern’s fortune at the time can be guessed from the amount of his Jewish religious tax (Kultussteuer), which rose steadily: Whereas this levy was 400 marks in 1913, Stern as director of Ossag was assessed with 5,000 marks in Jewish religious tax in 1921, an amount that Stern did not pay again to this level until 1926 after overcoming the inflation crisis of 1923 – by then in the new reichsmark currency. Hamburg University, founded after the First World War, was supported by the owner-managed Ossag in 1920 through a generous donation. The company thus found itself in the circle of both the Jewish and non-Jewish economic-industrial elite of the Hanseatic city.
Leo Stern nevertheless kept in touch with his native town in the Hessian hinterland, where relatives still lived. On the 1000-year anniversary of the community of Breidenbach in 1913, Stern, together with Sonneborn from Hamburg, sent telegrams with greetings and a generous monetary donation to his birthplace.
In 1924, Leo Stern resigned from the active management of Ossag in favor of his son Otto and, like Sonneborn, transferred to the company’s supervisory board. This change in management took place in the course of the merger with a German subsidiary of the Shell Group in 1925. The company henceforth operated as Rhenania-Ossag Mineralölwerke AG and continued its rapid expansion course at the Hamburg site as well. Stern initially compensated for the loss of the company’s previously independent position by continuing to serve on the supervisory board.
His gradual retreat ‘into the private sphere,’ time which he preferred to spend inconspicuously with his wife and in the circle of his family, was also indicated by the sale of the Hamburg urban villa at Leinpfad 6 to a Japanese investor in 1928. Stern and his wife Bella then moved into an apartment at Andreasstrasse 9. During the 1920s, all six of Leo and Bella Stern’s grandchildren were born in Hamburg: daughter Erna’s children in 1919 and 1920, the oldest son Otto’s children in 1924 and 1928, and son Walter’s children in 1924, 1928, and 1930.
Due to the Nazi takeover, the commercial activities of the Stern sons and the son-in-law in Hamburg were made increasingly difficult because of their "racial” affiliation and finally, in the course of company "Aryanizations,” made completely impossible by 1938. However, Leo Stern was the first of the Stern family to experience the forms of degradation that even major industrialists and successful company founders were subjected to under the new regime: Like his business partner Sonneborn, Stern was forced out of the supervisory board of Rhenania-Ossag in the spring of 1933 because of his Jewish descent. Even before the Nazi government issued official directives on the "Aryanization” of companies, the new management of Rhenania-Ossag, being a subsidiary of a foreign corporation, Royal Dutch Shell, attempted in this way to pander politically to the new regime. Other close relatives of the founding entrepreneurs, such as Leo Stern’s nephew Richard Stern, as well as other senior Jewish employees of Rhenania-Ossag, lost their jobs as a result of the anti-Semitic persecutions and tried to save their lives by emigrating.
In Feb. 1933, on his seventy-fifth birthday, Leo Stern had written a "curriculum vitae” in which he described his personal and entrepreneurial career. At the end of 1936, after his long-time business partner Jacques Sonneborn had died, Stern "published” this 23-page manuscript, presumably circulating it among his immediate family, but also among friends and acquaintances. At this time, Leo Stern must have painfully realized that with the rise of the Nazis, a brutal end had been forced upon the future economic-industrial activity of his person and that of his family members. However, Stern did not openly admit this in his curriculum vitae. He completely blanked out the anti-Semitic persecution measures by the Nazis since 1933 in this text, which he had conceived as a legacy of his entrepreneurial life’s work and which he intended to be understood as such. A copy of Leo Stern’s typescript, which was translated into English by his daughter Erna in 1962, found its way into the archives of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York in 1965.
Leo and Bella Stern’s daughter Erna had moved abroad with her children and husband, an insurance broker, at the end of 1937; their son Walter Stern left Hamburg and the German Reich with his children and wife in Mar. 1938. It was probably only the admonitions and the example of their own children that finally persuaded the Stern couple, who had relocated to Maria-Louisen-Strasse 120 around 1937, to move away from Hamburg, where they had spent a good 40 years of their life together.
At the beginning of May 1938, Leo Stern, then 80 years old, and his wife left the German Reich, initially with the destination Merano (Italy). In order to escape the grasp of the Nazis for good, the couple entered Switzerland from Fascist Italy after about six months, where they first lived in Locarno from Nov. 1938 and later took up residence in Zurich. How narrowly the Sterns escaped to "neutral” Switzerland is shown by the fact that, in agreement between German and Swiss authorities, from Oct. 1938 onward the passports of German citizens of the Jewish faith were stamped with a red "J” and henceforth those seeking entry were frequently turned away at the Swiss border.
Stern’s attempts to export parts of his assets from Germany were largely thwarted by the anti-Jewish special levies and taxation measures imposed by German authorities. As restitution files attest, Leo Stern had to pay a Reich flight tax (Reichsfluchtsteuer) amounting to 67,750 RM (reichsmark) to the Hamburg tax office in 1938, as well as a "levy on Jewish assets” ("Judenvermögensabgabe”) amounting to 19,250 RM at the end of the year. On capital assets of 90,000 RM, which Stern wished to transfer abroad in 1938, the German Reich levied deductions of over 90 percent, so that only 2,875 RM of this sum was paid out. Due to the extensive destruction of their economic livelihood, the Sterns managed to hold their own only temporarily in Swiss exile with the help and support of their children, who had already fled to the USA and Britain.
Apparently, Leo and Bella Stern were deeply unwilling to leave Europe because of their German origins and their deep roots in German language and culture. Their advanced age may also have made this decision difficult for them, as it did for many other Germans of their generation. Only in the course of 1941, faced with the complete hopelessness of returning to their German homeland, did the Sterns finally pursue their emigration from Switzerland.
After receiving their visas issued in Zurich on 27 Oct. 1941, they embarked two and a half weeks later in Lisbon, Portugal, on the American "SS Excambion,” along with numerous other Jewish refugees from all over Europe. After a ten-day crossing, they reached the port of New York on 24 Nov. 1941. The Sterns had already left Europe in Lisbon as stateless persons: Four days after issuing their visas, the German Reich declared Leo and Bella Stern expatriated, marking the culmination of their disenfranchisement and thus the destruction of their social and economic of existence.
Leo Stern died in New York in 1943, still stateless. Because of their expatriation, the Sterns’ remaining assets in Germany were forfeited to the German Reich. Leo’s widow Bella died in New York in 1950.
Their oldest son Otto, who had emigrated from Romania to the U.S. with his wife and children in 1940, had died in a plane crash in 1946.
Only two of Leo Stern’s children, Erna and Walter, outlived their parents. The youngest son Paul had already died in Hamburg on 24 Dec. 1934 and he was buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Ohlsdorf.
Leo Stern’s brother Josef died in Cologne on 13 July 1934 at the age of 83. His widow Ella, née Gidion, who came from a merchant family in Cologne-Siegburg, left Germany at the end of 1939 to emigrate to the United States to join her son Richard. On 23 Feb. 1940, she arrived on the "SS Statendam” from Rotterdam in New York, where she died on 12 Aug. 1943.
Translator: Erwin Fink
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.
Stand: May 2021
© Eva Pietsch
Quellen: Adressbücher der Stadt Hamburg; Ekkehard Nümann (Hg.), Die Begründer der Hamburgischen Wissenschaftlichen Stiftung, Hamburg 2017 (3. Aufl. 2019), S. 79, 103f.; Kultussteuerkartei der jüdischen Gemeinde Hamburg, Sta HH Bestand 522-1;Wilhelm Levison, Die Siegburger Familie Levison und verwandte Familien, Bonn 1952, S. 134-137; Eva Pietsch, "Alles wie geschmiert…"? Die Geschäfte mit "weissem Öl" zwischen internationalen Markt- und deutschen Kriegsinteressen 1880-1933 (aus Sicht des Gründerunternehmers Leo Stern), in: Yaman Kouli u.a. (Hg.), Regionale Ressourcen und Europa. Dimensionen kritischer Industrie- und Unternehmensgeschichtsschreibung (FS für Rudolf Boch), Berlin 2018, S. 53-74; Jürgen Runzheimer, Abgemeldet zur Auswanderung, Marburg 1992, Bd. 1, S. 67, 130; Namentliches Verzeichnis sämtlicher Gewerbesteuerpflichtigen, Gemeinde Breidenbach, Steuerbezirk Battenberg, in: Gemeindearchiv IX, Blätter No. 238, 248 u. 259, StA Marburg; Mitteilungen aus Geschichte und Heimatkunde des Kreises Biedenkopf, 7. Jg Nr. 7 und 8, vom 7.8.1913, S. 133, in: Gemeindearchiv Breidenbach, X, Nr. 273; http://www.bildarchivhamburg.de/hamburg/winterhude/leinpfad/index.htm. Für Nachweise zu Leos und Bellas Ausreise in die USA 1941 sei David Gordon gedankt.
