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Anna Mayer * 1874

Thadenstraße 120 (Altona, Altona-Altstadt)

HIER WOHNTE
ANNA MAYER
JG. 1874
DEPORTIERT 1941
ERMORDET IN
MINSK

Anna Mayer, born 23 Dec. 1874 in Ribnitz, deported 18 Nov. 1941 to Minsk, murdered there

Thadenstraße 120–122 (Gärtnerstraße 120–128)

Anna Mayer was from a long-established Jewish family in Ribnitz (present-day Ribnitz-Damgarten) in Mecklenburg, where her father, Isidor Mayer, was a businessman. She was the eldest of three siblings. Her brother Hans was born when she was five years old, and her sister Grete one year later. In 1909, after Isidor Mayer’s death, her mother Franziska (née Pincus) and her 20-year-old daughter Grete moved from Ribnitz to Doberan (present-day Bad Doberan). Franziska was able to live from her husband’s pension and investments. In 1910 Grete married Julius Marcus, a businessman from Güstrow, in Rostock, and moved with him to Harburg, which at that time was a part of Hanover.

It is not known when Anna Mayer came to Hamburg. She lived in the residential foundation established by Benjamin Leja in 1869 at Gärtnerstraße 120–128 (present-day Thadenstraße). The residents were primarily elderly women of both Christian and Jewish heritage, but some married couples also lived there. Apparently she moved to the Martin Brunn Residence (likewise a residential foundation, part of the Vaterländischen Stiftung for the elderly) at Frickestraße 24 shortly before the May 1939 census. She lived in apartment number 5.

Anna Mayer never married. Her nephew Erich Marcus, Grete and Julius Marcus’ son, and his wife Elsi and daughter Silvia lived near her in Hamburg. Two of her brother-in-law Julius’s sisters, Ella and Rosalie Marcus, also lived in Hamburg.

During the Nazi regime the Brunn-Stift was designated as a "Jews’ house.” Beginning in April 1938, The Gestapo concentrated Hamburg’s Jewish population in Eppendorf and Eimsbüttel, both directly, by means of legal ordinance, and indirectly, by denying Jews the ability to earn a living. The regime left many of the Jewish Community’s social institutions to be administered by the Jewish Religious Organization, as the Jewish Community was now called, so that it could house Jews who had been evicted from their homes. The concentration of Jews in a specific area also made the later deportation easier.

The deportations of Hamburg’s Jews to the occupied eastern territories began in the fall of 1941. Ella Marcus was the first member of the family to be deported when she was assigned to the transport to Lodz on 25 October 1941. Anna Mayer had to say farewell to the remaining members of her family two weeks later when she was deported with the second large transport to Minsk.

She and two other residents of the Martin Brunn-Stift, the 60-year-old Lilli Brauer (née Riese) and the 71-year-old Rosa Simon (née Cohn), received their "evacuation orders” on 8 November 1941. They were to be deported to Minsk ten days later. Anna Mayer herself was 66 years old. The three women were thus at or over the age limit for the deportees who were to "rebuild the east.” Adelheide Singer (55), the mother of Anna’s niece Elsi Marcus, was on the same transport. The relatives presumably lived together in the Minsk Ghetto until their deaths, the circumstances of which are unknown.

There are Stolpersteine for Grete and Julius Marcus in Eimsbüttel, for Erich and Elsi Marcus and their daughter Silvia in Hamburg Mitte, and for Ella Marcus and Adelheide Singer in Eimsbüttel.


Translator: Amy Lee
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: April 2018
© Hildegard Thevs

Quellen: 1; 3; 4; 9; Stadtarchiv Bad Doberan, Zuzugsmeldung Franziska Mayer; Stadtarchiv Rostock, Heiratsregister 224/1910; StaH 522-1 Jüdische Gemeinden, 992e 2 Band 2 (Deportationsliste Minsk, 8.11.1941); StaH 332-8 Meldewesen, A 34/1 (Alphabetische Meldekartei von "Groß-Altona" (= 741-4 Fotoarchiv, K 4497; Biographien für die Familie Marcus in: Barbara Günter u. a., Stolpersteine, S. 165–167; Biographien weiterer Familienangehöriger siehe: www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de.
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