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Mathilde Meyer * 1891

Eppendorfer Landstraße 24 (Hamburg-Nord, Eppendorf)

1941 Lodz
1942 Chelmno ermordet

further stumbling stones in Eppendorfer Landstraße 24:
Gertrud Jacobsohn

Mathilde Meyer, born on 8 Feb. 1891 in Wittmund/East Friesland, deported on 25 Oct. 1941 to Lodz, deported further on 15 May 1942 to Chelmno

Eppendorfer Landstrasse 24

Mathilde Meyer was the illegitimate daughter of Helene Meyer (1851–1922), a Jewish scrap dealer and owner of a small dry goods store based in Wittmund.

As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, Wittmund had developed into an extremely anti-Semitic place. For instance, in the Reichstag elections of 1924, the National Socialist Workers’ Party received 46 percent of votes in the Wittmund administrative district and the German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei – DNVP) 13 percent. At the time, this constituted a völkisch-nationalist, anti-Semitic share of the vote not equaled anywhere in the German Reich. In a small town with a population of 2,435 (in 1925), the 53 Jews residing there had little chance to hide and were known to everyone.

Mathilde Meyer had already left the town in 1921, moving to Hamburg. There she joined the Jewish Community that same year. She worked as a domestic help, on several occasions as a housekeeper in better-off families, but always in the quarter around Eppendorfer Landstrasse, Isestrasse, Grindelberg, and Heilwigstrasse. In the very end, until her deportation, she was employed in the household of the jurist and retired university professor Otto Opet (1866–1941) at Eppendorfer Landstrasse 24 on the third floor.

She remained unmarried. Her earnings were always very meager but she regularly paid her Jewish religious tax (Kultussteuer) amounting to three or four reichsmark (RM) a year – until 1935. From 1935 onward, payment of this sum was initially deferred, and then waived entirely on a year-to-year basis. As a matter of fact, the anti-Semitic actions of the Nazis increasingly weakened the financial position of potential Jewish employers, rendering them less and less capable of affording a domestic servant. Consequently, Mathilde’s contracts of employment were dissolved more quickly than in the past. She was unemployment more often by this time. Various posts in the years 1938 with 70 RM gross income a month and in 1939 with 40 RM a month including free room and board were paid relatively well, though always lasting only a brief period. After that, she was without any income again.

On the first deportation train leaving Hamburg, the transport on 25 Oct. 1941, departure at 10:10 a.m. from Hannoversche Bahnhof train station, Mathilde Meyer was deported to Lodz. Another 1,034 persons were on the train as well. In Lodz, she survived for just over half a year. On 15 May 1942, she was taken to Chelmno, the extermination camp connected with Lodz. There she was probably killed in one of the special trucks using gas. She reached the age of 51.


Translator: Erwin Fink

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: October 2017
© Johannes Grossmann

Quellen: 1; 4; 5; 8; StaH 522-1, Jüd. Gemeinden, 992e2 Band 1; Hamburger Adressbuch 1940; Archiwum Panstwowe, Lodz (Getto Archiv), Melderegister, PL-39-278-1011-1483.tif und 1484.tif; Historisches Handbuch der jüdischen Gemeinden, Herbert Oben aus u. a. (Hrsg.), Bd. 1, 2005, S. 1570; Auskünfte von Edzard Eichenbaum (Wittmund), Brief vom 29.6. 2010.
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