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Minna Heilbut * 1894

Deichstraße / Ecke Kajen (Hamburg-Mitte, Hamburg-Altstadt)

HIER WOHNTE
MINNA HEILBUT
JG. 1894
DEPORTIERT 1941
RIGA
ERMORDET

further stumbling stones in Deichstraße / Ecke Kajen:
Julie Heilbut, Rosa Heilbut

Julie Heilbut, born 12 Aug. 1934 in Hamburg, deported 6 Dec. 1941 to Riga-Jungfernhof
Minna Heilbut, née Mendel, born 20 Jan. 1894 in Hamburg, deported 6 Dec. 1941 to Riga-Jungfernhof
Rosa Heilbut, born 12 Dec. 1925 in Hamburg, deported 6 Dec. 1941 to Riga-Jungfernhof

Deichstraße 48-50 (Deichstraße 52)

Minna Heilbut was born on 20 Jan. 1894, the daughter of Nathan Seligmann Mendel (born on 17 Sept. 1853) and Julie, née Leers (born on 8 Aug. 1860), at Herrengraben 37-39. Her father, son of the fur trader Moses Mendel and Hindel, née Seligmann, was a coal seller at that address and owned the property. Her mother was the daughter of Simon Lipmann Leers and Rosalie, née Breslau. The Jewish families Mendel and Leers lived in Altona where Nathan Seligmann Mendel and Julie Leers were married on 27 Mar. 1885 in a civil service.

Minna attended the private higher girls’ school, the lyceum of Dr. Jakob Löwenberg at Johnsallee 33. Afterwards, she, like all of her ten siblings, was trained to work at her father’s coal store "N.S. Mendel”. She became a bookkeeper in the office. After the sudden death of her father on 19 Feb. 1911, her mother acquired one of the old storage houses along the Nikolaifleet Canal and moved the coal business and her family to Cremon 24 (the building no longer exists).

Ten years later, Julie Mendel was buried next to her husband at Ilandkoppel Jewish Cemetery in Ohlsdorf. She passed away on 8 Mar. 1921 at a sanatorium in Oberneuland near Bremen.

The company E. H. Werner Brennstoffvertrieb GmbH took over the coal business on Cremon. The following year the company also purchased the property.

In Sept. 1922 Minna and her younger sister Rosa (born 12 Feb. 1900, died 22 Mar. 1978) opened a tobacco and cigarette shop on the ground floor of the building at Heußweg 36 in Eimsbüttel District. Her brothers Harry (born 20 Sept. 1898, died in 1982) and Philipp Mendel (born 1 June 1895) founded the company Gebr. Mendel, a coal business in St. Pauli District, at Fischerstraße 40/41 (the street no longer exists) and then at Allee 207 (today Max-Brauer-Allee) in Altona.

On 2 Jan. 1925 Minna married the commercial clerk Jacob Gottschalk Simon Heilbut. The son of the merchant Gottschalk Heilbut (born 27 Mar. 1832, died 22 Oct. 1905) and his second wife Rosa (Rosette), née Polack (born 21 July 1855 in Papenburg), was born on 24 Jan. 1896 in Hamburg where his parents had also married on 4 June 1895. His younger brother Iwan Heilbut (born 15 July 1898) live in Berlin as of 1923 where he worked as a journalist for various daily newspapers.

Jacob Heilbut had live with his widowed mother at Heinrich-Barth-Straße 15 until her death on 8 Aug. 1924. Minna moved in with him there after their wedding. On 12 Dec. 1925 their eldest daughter Rosa, nicknamed Rosel, was born.

Due to the world economic crisis, Minna Heilbut changed her business on Heußweg to a bakery and pastry shop in 1931. Her sister left the business (she later immigrated to the USA in Oct. 1935).

In 1932 the Heilbuts opened another store at Schwenckestraße 81, corner of Stellingerweg 20. On 12 Aug. 1934 their second daughter Julie was born. For financial and economic reasons, the couple left their apartment on Heinrich-Barth-Straße and moved their family into the apartment at the rear of their cellar shop at Schwenckestraße 81. They gave up their shop on Heußweg.

In Aug. 1935 Jacob Heilbut removed a poster of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) with the appeal "German People, Wake Up” that had been plastered to the wall of their building to the right of the store entrance in the early hours of the morning. The owner of the bakery across the street at Stellingerweg 20 saw him remove the poster with water and a putty knife and reported him to the local NSDAP leader of Eimsbüttel-Nord who, in turn, filed a complaint with the Gestapo for "malicious and deliberate damage and removal of an official NSDAP poster”.

On 23 Aug. 1935 Jacob Heilbut was arrested on the charge of sabotage and initially taken to Hütten Police Prison. On 10 Sept. 1935 Hamburg Local Court sentenced him for vandalism to six weeks in prison. In a plea for clemency in Oct. 1935, Jacob Heilbut addressed the charge of sabotage thus: "I do not work in my wife’s bakery, I am strained to such an extent by the economic situation which prohibits us from hiring an assistant, by housework, childcare, school work, laundry, etc. in a household with two underage children, one only 12 months old, it is not imaginable where there could still be time for thoughts of sabotage.” His appeal was rejected. Jacob Heilbut had to serve his prison sentence, albeit minus the time he already spent in custody while under investigation. The final three weeks he served at Glasmoor Penitentiary.

Due to growing hostility and "stirring up of hatred by their competitors”, the Heilbuts found themselves forced to give up their business on 1 Mar. 1937. The loss of their livelihood also meant the loss of their home. They moved into a small "storage apartment” with an improvised kitchen at Deichstraße 52 (the building no longer exists, it was located across from today’s number 47). After his release from prison, Jacob Heilbut did manage to find work as an accountant at the company Glaser & Co. at Neuer Wall 10, but in Feb. 1937 he was let go for lack of work. As a welfare recipient, Jacob Heilbut was then called up to do heavy excavation work, first in Waltershof in a mud field, later in Tiefstaak (today Tiefstack) in road construction.

On 14 June 1938 Jacob Heilbut was arrested once again. He and about 700 men in Hamburg, 200 of whom were Jewish, were taken into "protective custody” during the so-called July Operation. He was released from Sachsenhausen concentration camp on 4 Jan. 1939 under the provision that he reports to the Gestapo on a daily basis and leave Germany by the end of March.

Jacob Heilbut was unable to find a country that he could immediately move to. While his sister-in-law Rosa Mendel sent him affidavits from Cincinnati, only her brothers Harry and Philipp were allowed to immigrate to the USA in the summer of 1939. After receiving an extension to his period of stay, Jacob Heilbut finally managed to receive a visa for England. He never saw his family again after leaving Germany in Apr. 1939. The last news from Hamburg reached him in 1941.

After her husband’s arrest, Minna Heilbut suffered a nervous breakdown. What’s more, she could not continue living at Deichstraße with her daughters. She had to move into part of an apartment belonging to Behrend at Bornstraße 20, a building that later became a "Jewish house”. Her hopes of getting her daughters to safety on a children’s transport were also crushed. Rosa, the older of the two, had attended the Israelite Daughter’s School on Carolinenstraße. The Jewish girls’ school was combined with the Talmud Torah School in Apr. 1939 and forced to rename itself "Elementary and High School for Jews” in Dec. 1939. Shortly before, the entire school had been moved back to Carolinenstraße since Reich Governor Karl Kaufmann had decided that the Hanseatic High School for Teacher Training was to use the school building in Grindelhof. Rosa was released from the school in Apr. 1940. Her homeroom teacher Ernst Streim (born on 4 July 1893) wrote in her school-leaving certificate: "R. successfully completed the highest grade of elementary school. The school releases her with the best wishes for her future.”

As a Jew, Rosa was unable to find an apprenticeship. According to the entry in the deportation list, she worked as a domestic servant. Her sister Julie started school in Aug. 1941. She was only able to attend school for four months. Minna Heilbut and her daughters were deported to Riga on 6 Dec. 1941. Rosa’s teacher Ernst Streim and his wife Erna, née Ullmann (born on 1 Sept. 1901), and their two children Mirjam (born on 24 June 1927) and Walter (born on 23 Dec. 1928) were also deported on the same transport (Stumbling Stones at Grindelallee 184).

Since the operation to shoot all the local Jews in Riga Ghetto – to "make space” – was not yet finished, their train was redirected to Jungfernhof Manor, six kilometers away. We do not know whether Minna Heilbut and her daughters were shot to death during "Operation Dünamünde” in Mar. 1942 or they were taken with the others to Riga Ghetto.

Jacob Heilbut was interned as a German in England on the Isle of Man from 1940 to 1945. After the war he joined his brother Iwan Heilbut in New York.

Iwan Heilbut and his family managed to flee from France via Portugal to New York. The Czechoslovakian Consul in Marseille Vladimír Vochocˇ (born in 1894, died in 1984) had helped him with fake passports. The journalist, writer and poet Iwan Heilbut died on 15 Apr. 1972 in Bonn.

Jacob Heilbut returned to Hamburg in 1952. Two years before his death on 19 Sept. 1979, he placed memorial sheets at Yad Vashem in Israel for his wife and two daughters.

Minna Heilbut’s sister Clara Nathan, née Mendel (born on 9 July 1887), was deported with her husband, the furniture salesman Julius Nathan, and their son Henry to Lodz Ghetto in Oct. 1941. Henry Nathan was the sole survivor in his family (see Rosa Weinberg).

Soon Stumbling Stones will be laid in memory of his parents at Hammerbrookstraße 22.

Minna’s sister Gertha Seligsohn (see her entry), née Mendel (born on 8 Oct. 1890), was also killed along with her family. They were deported to Minsk Ghetto. Her nephew Hermann Seligsohn was sent to the killing center in Brandenburg on the River Havel. Minna’s younger sister Bertha Mendel (born on 6 July 1903) was also killed there (see Bertha Mendel).

Her sister Franziska Rüdiger, née Mendel (born on 18 Nov. 1885), lived in a so-called mixed marriage. She was deported to Theresienstadt shortly before the end of the war on 14 Feb. 1945, from where she was later liberated.

Her brother Wolf Mendel (born on 16 Mar. 1892) died in Hamburg on 24 Apr. 1937, her eldest brother Moses (born on 31 Aug. 1888) was killed during World War I on 24 Apr. 1915 as a German soldier in Saint Rémy, France.

Translator: Suzanne von Engelhardt
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: April 2020
© Susanne Rosendahl

Quellen: 1; 6; 8; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 2109 u 5614/1885; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 2154 u 3347/1887; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 2180 u 4109/1888; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 2231 u 4242/1890; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 2284 u 1082/1892; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 2340 u 390/1894; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 2405 u 3462/1896; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 2461 u 3063/1898; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 13401 u 492/1900; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 7982 u 438/1905; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 719 u 1521/1915; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 884 u 317/1924; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 8798 u 1/1925; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 1070 u 1800/1937; StaH 213-11 Amtsgericht Hamburg 0124/36; StaH 351-11 AfW 39436 (Heilbut, Jacob); StaH 351-11 AfW 19009 (Heilbut, Jacob); StaH 351-11 AfW 21181 (Mendel, Harry); StaH 351-11 AfW 16954 (Mendel, Philipp); StaH 351-11 AfW 8127 (Rüdiger, Franziska); StaH 522-1 Jüdische Gemeinde Nr. 992 e 2 Band 3; StaH 522-1 Jüdische Gemeinde Nr. 992 e 2 Band 5; Auskunft von Fritz Neubauer, Universität Bielefeld, E-Mail vom 16.4.2014 und 18.4.2014; Yad Vashem, Zentrale Datenbank der Namen der Holocaustopfer Minna Heilbut (Gedenkblatt); Yad Vashem, Zentrale Datenbank der Namen der Holocaustopfer Julie Heilbut (Gedenkblatt); Yad Vashem, Zentrale Datenbank der Namen der Holocaustopfer Rosa Heilbut (Gedenkblatt); http://kuenste-im-exil.de/KIE/Content/DE/Objekte/erc-heilbut-pass.html?single=1 (Zugriff 6.9.2016); Stern: Werke, S. 164; Randt: Talmud Tora Schule, S. 169.
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