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Joel Rosenberg * 1941

Bismarckstraße 67 (Eimsbüttel, Eimsbüttel)

HIER WOHNTE
JOEL
ROSENBERG
JG. 1941
DEPORTIERT 1941
MINSK
ERMORDET

further stumbling stones in Bismarckstraße 67:
Irene Rosenberg, Manfred Rosenberg, Margarethe Silberstein

Irene Rosenberg, née Oppenheim, born on 4 Feb. 1920 in Berlin, deported on 18 Nov. 1941 to Minsk, murdered there
Joel Rosenberg, born on 6 Jan. 1941 in Hamburg, deported on 18 Nov. 1941 to Minsk, murdered there
Manfred Rosenberg, born on 10 May 1909 in Hamburg, deported on 8 Nov. 1941 to Minsk, murdered there

Bismarckstrasse 67

Little Joel was only ten months old when he was sent to his death in Minsk. His parents, then 32-years-old Manfred Rosenberg and his wife Irene, eleven years his junior, had made efforts to escape the Nazi terror: In May 1940, they had moved from Hamburg to Berlin, Irene’s place of birth, in order to join a (hachshara) community, thus preparing for emigration to Palestine. At this time, the young woman was already pregnant, and this step may have seemed to them as the last possibility to save their lives and that of their unborn child. However, the departure from Germany failed and they returned to Hamburg a short time afterward.

Manfred Rosenberg was the only son of the married couple Bernhard and Martha Rosenberg. His wife also came from a Rosenberg family. That family lived in the small town of Lehe, today a district of Bremerhaven, where Martha was born in 1887. His father, born in Hamburg in 1883, had learned the butcher’s trade and thus continued the family tradition. Even Manfred’s grandfather, Eduard Rosenberg, had worked as a butcher. He came from the Oldenburg region and had married Minna Cohn, a native of Altona five years his junior. The two had three children: Bernhard, the oldest, Bertha, who was two years younger, and Paul, born in 1889. In the following year, Eduard Rosenberg opened a slaughterhouse on Glashüttenstrasse, where he stayed only for a brief period, however. In 1892, he relocated to Brüderstrasse 6, where he operated his business for 15 years.

When he retired in 1907, Bernhard succeeded him. However, to begin with his work as a butcher did not last very long. In May 1909, he and his wife Martha had a son they named Manfred. He would be their only child. A few months later, Bernhard Rosenberg relocated his business to Bellealliancestrasse for a mere two years, then changing trades. Joining his brother Paul, a trained merchant five years his junior, he founded "Gebr. Rosenberg, Agentur und Kommission” ("Rosenberg Bros., Agency and Commissions”) at Durchschnitt 13 in 1912. Henceforth, both of them worked as commercial agents. By this time, the same house also accommodated their parents, Eduard and Minna Rosenberg. However, in 1914 Bernhard Rosenberg left the company and his brother Paul continued to manage it on his own.

In 1919, Bernhard Rosenberg and his family left Hamburg to seek their fortune in Martha’s hometown near Bremerhaven. A large-scale slaughterhouse and stockyard had just opened there, a circumstance that may have prompted the married couple to take this step. Nine years later, they returned to Hamburg, with Bernhard Rosenberg opening his own butcher’s operation at Lindenallee 12 in the basement. The couple also found accommodation in the same house. In 1928, Bernhard’s mother Minna passed away; that same year, his brother Paul married Bertha Rubensohn. Bertha Rosenberg was married as well by then, to the master hairdresser Siegfried Wolff. The couple lived on Hansastrasse.

When Manfred Rosenberg’s parents returned to Hamburg, he was 19 years old. Having completed a commercial apprenticeship, he found work in the Hanseatic city as a commercial clerk. He no longer resided with his parents but as a subtenant at changing addresses – among other places on Altonaer Strasse, Kleiner Schäferkamp, Weidenallee, and Schulterblatt.

After the Nazis assumed power in 1933, Paul Rosenberg’s business declined dramatically. Many of his non-Jewish customers no longer bought his goods. To be sure, he managed to build up a Jewish clientele but the customers bought only small amounts. In 1936, he gave up the operation on Steilshooperstrasse, relocating the office into the apartment – by then, he and his wife lived at Rappstrasse 20 – and rented a storeroom for the products on Grindelallee. By contrast, Bernhard Rosenberg’s butcher’s shop apparently continued to do business unchanged, even though starting in 1933, Jewish butchers were disadvantaged by the relevant Hamburg authority when it came to allocations of meat quotas. However, at the end of 1938, he, like many other Jewish business people in Hamburg, had to close his shop or sell it to a non-Jewish butcher, respectively.

In 1934, there was another death in the family: That year, Manfred Rosenberg’s grandfather Eduard passed away, the father of Bernhard, Bertha, and Paul.

On 10 Nov. 1938, the Gestapo arrested Paul and Bernhard Rosenberg as well as Bertha’s husband Siegfried Wolff in their homes, initially taking them to the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp and from there to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Paul Rosenberg was released on 14 Dec. 1938, Bernhard Rosenberg and Siegfried Wolf one week later. The mistreatments he and other prisoners were subjected to in Sachsenhausen shook Paul Rosenberg to such an extent that from then on, he and his wife spared no effort to flee Germany. They succeeded in this endeavor by selling their entire household effects and purchasing from the proceeds two one-way tickets for passage to the USA, for which they had a visa. On 25 July, they sailed to New York aboard the MS Washington. Bernhard and Bertha Rosenberg remained in Hamburg, as did Siegfried and Bertha Wolff.

Manfred and Irene Rosenberg’s attempt to leave Germany after all, by means of a (hachshara) stay, lasted only for about three months. When they got married on 31 Aug. 1940, this already happened back in Hamburg; the records office noted their joint address as "Grindelallee 146.” Shortly afterward, they changed accommodation once more: When their son Joel was born at the Israelite Hospital on Johnsallee on 6 Jan. 1941, they resided as subtenants with Jacobsohn at Bismarckstrasse 67a. Whereas Manfred Rosenberg stayed there, Irene moved with little Joel to the "Jews’ house” ("Judenhaus”) at Grindelallee 21. The family was not deported together either. Manfred Rosenberg received an "evacuation order” ("Evakuierungsbefehl”) for the first transport to Minsk on 8 Nov. 1942; Irene and Joel for the second transport on 18 Nov. 1942. Manfred Rosenberg’s parents Bernhard and Martha, too, were deported by the Gestapo to Minsk on 8 November, as were Bertha and Siegfried Wolff. None of them survived.

From the auctioning of Bernhard and Martha Rosenberg’s household effects from Lindenallee 12, the office of the Chief Finance Administrator (Oberfinanzpräsident) collected another 447.15 reichsmark.

Paul and Bertha Rosenberg continued to live in New York until 1963. They then returned to Hamburg.


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

Stand: October 2018
© Frauke Steinhäuser

Quellen 1; 2 (FVg 5132); 4; 5; 8; StaH 241-1 Gerichtsvollzieherwesen 586; StaH 332-5 8094 u. 572/1928; ebd. 8124 u. 44/1934; ebd. 954 u. 188/1929; StaH 351-11 AWG 11155; StaH 522-1 Jüdische Gemeinden, 391 Gemeindemitglieder (Stand Herbst 1935); ebd., 390 Wählerliste 1930; ebd., 992e Deportationslisten Bde 2 u. 3; tel. Auskunft des Standesamts Eimsbüttel am 27.4.2012; Hamburger Adressbücher 1881–1942; "Aufbau", Vol. 46 Nr 13/1980, 21.3.1980, S. 32.
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