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Julius Heilbrunn
© Stadtarchiv Kassel A 3.32

Julius Heilbrunn * 1906

Eppendorfer Baum 5 (Eimsbüttel, Harvestehude)

1941 Lodz
ermordet ???

further stumbling stones in Eppendorfer Baum 5:
Helene Heymann, Heyman Heymann, Lotte Heymann

Julius Heilbrunn, born on 24 Aug. 1906 in Abterode; detained in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp from 10 Nov. 1938 to 19 Jan. 1939; deported on 25 Oct. 1941 to the Lodz Ghetto; taken on 28 June 1944 to the Kulmhof (Chelmno) extermination camp and murdered there.

Eppendorfer Baum 5

Julius Heilbrunn came from the Hessian town of Abterode. Abterode is located on the foot of "Hoher Meissner” mountain in Northern Hessen. The development of the Jewish community there dates back to the seventeenth century, and since then, it had been a fixed and recognized part of this town. Testimony to this was the large-scale Jewish cemetery and synagogue as well as the building of the former elementary school constructed in 1871.

Julius Heilbrunn’s father, the bookbinder Isaak Heilbrunn, married Ida Goldschmidt, a native of the nearby town of Frankershausen, in July 1905.

Their son Julius was born on 24 Aug. 1906 and he remained the family’s only child. It was not possible to find any traces of his childhood and youth. He did not follow in his father’s occupational footsteps but received commercial training, working in Kassel temporarily.

In his trade, he was unable to find a job in his native town. His parents, by then people on a small pension in need of assistance themselves, were unable to support him financially. Thus, he was forced to apply for social assistance in his native town, which was granted to him until he moved away from Abterode on 22 July 1933. Probably Julius Heilbrunn regarded the relocation from his hometown as a better chance of gaining a job. Thus, as of 23 July 1933, he stayed at Friedensstrasse 18 in Altona, "visiting,” as word was later on.

On 2 Aug. 1933, the visit ended, for reasons that can no longer be reconstructed, in the Altona court prison. From there, he was transferred to the prison in Kassel and released again on 9 Sept. 1933. Further research into the prison stay is no longer possible because the records of the Kassel judiciary were destroyed in wartime action. After a brief stay in his hometown, Julius Heilbrunn traveled to Hamburg and lived at Meissnerstrasse 5 with the widowed Mrs. Schwab from Oct. 1933 onward.
In July 1934, he found a means to earn a living as an office employee and office messenger with J. Jacobi & Co, a merchant trading company located at Neuer Wall 10. In the course of the "Aryanization” of Hamburg businesses and companies, this Jewish enterprise was given an auditor as a trustee from mid-1938 onward. The trustee liquidated the company and left the bankrupt estate to an "Aryan” merchant. Julius Heilbrunn afterward lost his job as of the end of May 1938. No Jewish employees were tolerated anymore in "Aryanized” companies.

At this point, he was forced once again to apply for unemployment benefits. Recipients had to perform work without payment in return for the support granted. Often, they were enlisted to do unfamiliar hard labor (e.g., in road construction), where they sustained physical harm, especially if they were already advanced in age.

Starting in early Oct. 1938, Julius Heilbrunn served for his "support” at a construction site in Hoisbüttel (Administrative District of Ahrensburg) for five days a week. These labor services involved closed operations "in which Jews do not come into contact with other members of the German nation,” according to the stipulation by the "President of the Reich Agency for Job Placement and Unemployment Insurance [Reichsanstalt für Arbeitsvermittlung und Arbeitsversicherung].

On 9 Nov. 1938, pogrom-like rioting against the Jewish population and Jewish institutions took place, which, organized from Munich, erupted as "spontaneous wrath of the people” in all of Germany after the death of the German diplomat vom Rath, who had been shot by the 17-year-old Jew Herschel Grynspan in Paris. Across the entire German Reich, approx. 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and interned in the Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. The goal was to use the humiliation and intimidation of the Jewish population to prompt their emigration from Germany.

In connection with these operations, on 11 Nov. 1938, one day after the riots in Hamburg, Julius Heilbrunn was arrested, taken to the Fuhlsbüttel prison, and from there forcibly transported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

The prisoners there were humiliated, beaten, and subjected to other forms of harassment. Julius Heilbrunn was exposed to such mistreatment until his release on 18 Jan. 1939. The persons released were not allowed to talk about their experiences, obliged to remain silent by a signed written statement. An impression of what he experienced is revealed by the photo of Julius Heilbrunn in his ID card dated Mar. 1939.
His previous host family, the Goldbergs, at Rutschbahn 4, where he had lived since May 1937, was expelled [to the Polish frontier] at the end of Oct. 1938 in the context of the so-called "Polenaktion.” After his release from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Julius Heilbrunn found new accommodations at Grindelallee 54 with Cohn. In the following years, he was "unsteadily” employed, as his Jewish religious tax (Kultussteuer) file card indicates.

We know from the Memorial Book of the German Federal Archives and the deportation list that Julius Heilbrunn was deported to the Lodz Ghetto on 25 Oct. 1941. His last Hamburg address was Eppendorfer Baum 5, with the Heymann family.

An irritating detail is the reference to a "voluntary departure [from Germany].”

From then on, Julius Heilbrunn’s "new reality” was the Lodz Ghetto, Hohensteiner Strasse 53, apartment 23. Within the ghetto, he was employed in the supply system of the ghetto starting on 26 Nov. 1941, working as an assistant mechanic in the grocery and bread division.

After only six months, in May 1942, he already received a "departure order.” This term meant nothing less than further deportation to the Chelmno extermination camp, a killing center that consisted of gas vans and a few buildings. Between Dec. 1941 and Mar. 1943, and then again in the summer of 1944, more than 150,000 persons were killed there using automotive exhaust fumes and buried in mass graves in a nearby forest.

In order to evade this "departure order” Julius Heilbrunn turned to the "Office for In-Migrants [those "settled in” ("eingesiedelt”) from the "Old Reich” ("Altreich”)]” ("Amt für Eingesiedelte”), departure division, a department of the ghetto administration, with a written petition, asking that he and his wife Edith Heilbrunn, née Gerson, be spared, as well as his parents-in-law Samuel and Johanna Gerson, who all lived together with him at the same address.

He described how useful all of the family members were; for instance, Johanna Gerson worked as a furrier and Edith Heilbrunn as an intern nurse in Hospital VI, a children’s hospital. This letter is also a possible explanation for Julius’ "voluntary departure”: Apparently, he did not want his family to go to the Lodz Ghetto by themselves.

According to the Jewish religious tax (Kultussteuer) file card, he was unmarried, something also suggested by his respective residential situation as a subtenant. It seems that Julius and Edith had met in Hamburg. It was not possible to establish whether a wedding took place in Hamburg shortly before the deportation. In the Lodz Ghetto, marriages could be formalized by ritual ceremony, without official validity as a civil marriage. No evidence for this ritual could be found either. Julius Heilbrunn indicated Edith Gerson as his wife upon arriving in the Lodz Ghetto. Probably in this way, he succeeded in them being able to stay together as a family in one apartment.

Edith Gerson’s family had been comprised of five persons overall. The father, Samuel, born in 1881, had originally learned the trade of baker. He changed occupations, became a merchant, and opened a store for household and kitchen appliances on Eimsbütteler Chaussee in 1911. This business closed in 1936. Because of National Socialist repression, it went bankrupt. Samuel fell ill with asthma so seriously that his state of health no longer allowed continuation of any gainful employment. His wife Johanna, born in 1888, the daughter of a furrier, had learned to sew. She obtained a license to practice this trade in late 1938, enabling her to contribute to the livelihood with needlework.
Son Robert took up his father’s original trade, working in the Wolff bakery, located at Rappstrasse 7. The business closed at the end of 1938, which to him meant the loss of his job.
His brother Theodor was employed at the Hirschfeld clothing store (due to "Aryanization,” the "Fahning” fashion store afterward) located at Neuer Wall. With his income, he was able to support his parents.
Both brothers decided to depart Germany for Shanghai. In Mar. 1939, they traveled by train to the Northern Italian city of Trieste, continuing from there aboard a ship to Shanghai. Later they found a new home in the USA.
Samuel Gerson accompanied his sons to Altonaer Bahnhof [train station]. Bidding them farewell, he told them, "I don’t know at all why you boys want to leave. All of this will surely be over in a few months. It cannot remain as bad as it is, after all.”
Not many personal details are known about the youngest family member, Edith, born in 1921. On the deportation list, the occupation indicated for her is nurse. She received her deportation order delivered by mail to "Grüne Strasse 5” in Altona. The house was the property of the Israelite Humanitarian Women’s Association (Israelitischer Humanitärer Frauenverein), one of the first modern social women’s organizations in Hamburg, and it served as a daycare center and, until its closure in 1942, as a retirement and nursing home. Possibly, Edith Gerson lived and worked there as a caregiver.
The petition by Julius Heilbrunn to the ghetto administration yielded the hoped-for result – it was marked with the Polish word "wzglednone,” which means the equivalent of "approved.”

The time spent together, however, already ended four months later in Sept. 1942. Edith Heilbrunn was deported to her certain death to the Chelmno extermination camp. In an interview in 1990, her brother Theodor Gerson reported that she had possibly been pregnant when arriving in the ghetto: "Edith did not return from the concentration camp, and the only thing we knew was that she had been pregnant …”

The deportations from the Lodz Ghetto in the period from 5 to 12 Sept. 1942 were designated as "Aktion Gehsperre” [literally, "operation walking block”]. This involved herding more than 15,000 people, mostly children under 10 and older persons over 65, together in a brutal police operation to deport them to the Chelmno extermination camp. The aim of the operation was to leave alive, as far as possible, only ghetto occupants able to work. The ghetto was to be transformed into a labor camp.

On 26 Nov. 1942, Samuel Gerson died. His burial place is located on the Lodz Jewish Cemetery, one of about 43,000 deceased persons from the Lodz Ghetto.
Julius Heilbrunn and his mother-in-law, Johanna Gerson, continued to live in the ghetto for nearly two more years, and they, along with some 800 other Jews, were deported on Transport no. 78 on 28 June 1944 to the Chelmno extermination camp and killed there.

In the face of the Soviet Army advancing, the Lodz Ghetto was to be dissolved gradually in order to eliminate the traces of the inhuman acts. The remaining ghetto occupants, fewer than 1,000 persons, experienced their liberation by Soviet troops on 19 Jan. 1945 – too late for Julius Heilbrunn and his family. His father Isaak already died in 1940; his mother Ida had to set out from Kassel to the Riga Ghetto on 9 Dec. 1941. She did not survive.

As was usual for deportations, the property of the deportees was confiscated to the benefit of the German Reich. Officials of the "Department for the Utilization of Assets” ("Vermögensverwertungsstelle”) cleared out the quarters and had the belongings picked up by moving companies. Private auctioneers and the Hamburg District Court (Amtsgericht) publicly auctioned off the confiscated property.

The auctions were announced in the daily newspapers, for instance, in the Hamburger Fremdenblatt, Hamburger Anzeiger, and the Hamburger Tageblatt. In connection with the "voluntary auction” by the Hamburg District Court on 2 and 3 Jan. 1942, the remaining property of Julius Heilbrunn was auctioned off: a leather briefcase, books, glassware, porcelain, pieces of clothing, ties, coat hangers, and lasts went to new owners.

The concluding remark by a judicial inspector regarding the result of the auction stated, "Everything was sold.” The proceeds amounted to 6.40 RM (reichsmark) to the benefit of the state treasury.

A Stolperstein in front of the house at Eppendorfer Baum 5 commemorates Julius Heilbrunn.

Translator: Erwin Fink

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: October 2016
© Christina Igla

Quellen: StaH: 1, 5, 8, StaH: 241-1 324 Versteigerung, 522-1 992e 2 Deportationsliste, 351-14 Fürsorgeakte; email von Karl Kollmann, Archiv- und Museumsleiter in Eschwege, vom 26.1.2012; E-Mail von Fritz Neubauer, Universität Bielefeld, vom 29.1.2012; Unterlagen aus Lodz; E-Mail von Beate Meyer, Institut für die Geschichte der Deutschen Juden, vom 5.2.2012; email von Ilona Plafki, Gemeinde Meissner, vom 8.2.2012; email von Heike Müller, IST Arolsen , 27.5.2012; email von Christian Lehmann, Stadtarchiv Kassel , vom 7.9.2012; E-Mail von Siegfried Butterweck, Sonderstandesamt Bad Arolsen, vom 7.12.2012; E-Mail von Ulf Bollmann, Staatsarchiv Hamburg, vom 11.2.2014; E-Mail von Hermann Wagner, Amtsgericht Kassel, vom 20.2.2014; Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen; Schreiben vom 28.6.2012; FHH, Standesamt Eimsbüttel, Telefonat v. 7.5.2012, email vom 24.10.2012; Datenbank Lodz Nr. 301/1219-1224 Familie Gerson; Klaus-Dieter Alicke: Lexikon der jüdischen Gemeinden im deutschen Sprachraum, Gütersloh 2008; Frank Bajohr, "Arisierung" in Hamburg, Seiten 198ff., Hamburg 1997; Beate Meyer, Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der Hamburger Juden 1933–1945, Seiten 45 und 60, Hamburg 2006; Alfred Gottwald, Diana Schulle, Die "Judendeportationen" aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–1945, Seiten 126,127, 182, Wiesbaden 2005; Hamburger Adressbuch 1937–1941; Galerie Morgenland "Wo Wurzeln waren", Seiten 102ff., Artikel: "Familie Gerson-Jeder hat versucht raus zu kommen" von Astrid Louven, Hamburg 1993; Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte, Werkstatt der Erinnerungen, Hamburger Lebensläufe ,Theodor Gerson, Interview vom 13.5.1990, Sybille Baumbach, Beate Meyer, Dagmar Wienrich; Joseph Walk, Das Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS-Staat, Seite 246, Heidelberg 2013; Stadtarchiv Kassel, A3.32, Kennkarte Julius Heilbrunn, http://www.jewishlodzcemetery.org/EN/CemeteryPlan/PersonId/3338/QuarterId/82/Default.aspx - Grabnachweis Samuel Gerson (angesehen am 29.1.2012); http://www.gemeinde-meissner.de (angesehen am 29.1.2012); FZF; 353-24, Band 2 Abrechnung Schutzhaftkosten.