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Porträt Maria Warburg
© UKE/IGEM

Maria Warburg * 1896

Palmaille 108 (Altona, Altona-Altstadt)

HIER WOHNTE
MARIA WARBURG
JG. 1896
EINGEWIESEN 1940
HEILANSTALT LANGENHORN
"VERLEGT" 23.9.1940
BRANDENBURG
ERMORDET 23.9.1940
"AKTION T4"

Emma Maria Amalie Warburg, born 9/6/1896 in Altona, murdered on 9/23/1940 at the killing institution Brandenburg on the Havel

Stumbling Stone Hamburg-Altona, Palmaille 108

Maria Warburg belonged to a Jewish family that had come to Altona many generations before from the Westphalian town of Warburg. Members of the family rose to great economic and social prominence in Altona and also in neighboring Hamburg. The R. D. Warburg line branched off from the family of Jacob Samuel Warburg who had settled in Altona around 1645 in its second generation. From this mainly mercantile branch of the family that continued living in Altona, respectively Hamburg, and later in Berlin, came the physicist Professor Emil Warburg, born 1846, who was president of the Reich Physical-Technical Institution in Berlin from 1905 to 1922, and his son, Nobel laureate Professor Otto Heinrich Warburg, born October 8, 1883 in Freiburg, died August 1, 1970 in Berlin. The Hamburg branch of the Warburgs came from the third generation of the family of Jacob Samuel Warburg, which included the founders of the Bank M.M. Warburg & Co., which still exists today.

The members of the family who remained in Altona engaged in social and welfare activities, creating several charitable foundations: the S. S. Warburg Foundation, the Warburg Foundation for the Support of Needy Craftspersons and the Betty Foundation in Altona. Albert Warburg, born June 23, 1843, died February 19, 1919, was successful as a partner in the Bank W. S. Warburg in Breitestrasse 15, founded 1804 by Wulf Salomon Warburg and his brother Samuel S. Warburg.

Albert Warburg’s brother Salomon Warburg, called Siegfried, born August 16, 1852, died June 8, 1934, was a Doctor of Laws and licensed as a notary public an attorney in the third generation and held the honorary title Justizrat ("Counselor of Justice”). For more than thirty years, he was president of the Red Cross Warrior Sanitary Corps in Altona. For a similarly long period, he was a member of the board of the Altonaer Kinderschutz und Jugendwohlfahrt E. V., a children’s and youth welfare society. During World War I, he was a delegate of the Reserve Army Hospital. He absolved his one-year military service as a reserve officer in the Infantry Regiment 31 in Altona. Jacob, the third brother of this generation, was killed in France in 1870 in the Franco-German war.

In 1890, Salomon Siegfried Warburg married Anna Elisabeth Brandis, a Lutheran Protestant born October 30, 1860. The couple had five children: Anna Helene, born April 28, 1891; Sophie Charlotte Henriette, born June 26, 1892; Pius Moritz Rudolf, born October 11, 1893; Carl Albert Otto, born March 15, 1895, and Emma Maria Amalie, born September 6, 1896. All children were born at the family home at Palmaille 31 in Altona.

With the exception of Pius Moritz Rudolf (called Rudolf in the following) and Emma Maria Amalie (Maria in the following), we know nothing about the fate of the children of Salomon Siegfried and Anna Elisabeth Warburg. When she was admitted to the Neustadt mental hospital late in her life, Maria Warburg stated that one of her sisters had emigrated to England.

Maria Warburg, youngest of the five children of Salomon Siegfried and Anna Elisabeth Warburg, had received a Christian baptism. From 1903, she attended a private elementary school and later the high school for girls in Altona. At her own request, Maria switched to the Hamburg highschool for girls, but had to quit after a short time because she was unable to cope with the curricula of several subjects. Later, Maria had to leave the boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland when World War I broke out in 1914.

In 1917, Maria Warburg passed the exam as a household management teacher and got her first job as a household and cattle manager on an estate near Halle in Saxony-Anhalt. Back in Hamburg, she first taught jobless girls at the labor agency, stood in for housekeeping teachers at the Hamburg school for household management and taught housekeeping at the Altona deaconess house. On the side, she worked at her father’s law office.

In 1922, Maria Warburg, who had always been healthy, fell ill with a serious case of tonsillitis from which she had trouble recovering. Various therapies and a stay at a health spa did not lead to a successful cure. In October 1922, she had sufficiently recovered to take a position as an au pair girl in Merano, Italy, which she managed to keep until June, 1923. When she returned, her parents experienced her as sad. On July 23, 1923, she attempted to commit suicide by jumping out of a third-floor window of the family home at Palmaille 31 in Altona, suffering serious, but not critical injuries.

Julius Cohn, a cousin of Maria’s father Salomon Siegfried Warburg, worked at the Hamburg state mental hospital in Friedrichsberg. It is probably due to this connection that made it possible to admit Maria Warburg from Altona to the Hamburg hospital for a month on August 9, 1923. From then on, Maria was almost continuously in medical treatment, either in mental hospitals or as an outpatient. In March 1927, a trial job as housekeeping teacher at the community welfare home in Hamburg-Ohlsdorf had to be terminated after just a few days. Stays at the private hospital of Dr. Lienau in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel and at the University Mental Hospital in Kiel followed.

In May 1931, Maria Warburg was again admitted to Friedrichsberg. At the time, her father said: "I am afraid my daughter is suffering from the oppressive feeling that her life has no meaning and that she is unable to create one for herself. I think that the terrible monetary situation back in 1923 made a terrible impression on her, an impression with continuing aftereffects to this day. Maria knows that I am totally impoverished and thinks that she ought to be earning money. I think that the poor girl’s feeling of being dependent and her completely precarious financial future play a big part in her illness.”

Maria Warburg stayed at Friedrichsberg until August 7, 1932. On January 2, 1935, she entered the state mental hospital at Neustadt in Holstein. In the meantime, she had lived with her parents, last with her mother. Her father, who had obviously been very important to her, had died on June 8, 1934. After his death, Anna Elisabeth Warburg quit the house at Palmaille 31, and she and her daughter Maria moved to Palmaille 108, where Maria lived until she went to the hospital in Neustadt. Shortly after her arrival there, Maria wrote a postcard to her mother: "I’m still at war with the nurses. But I suppose that will clear up; the anti-Semitism is really insulting.”

Maria maintained letter contact with her family during her stay in Neustadt; her regular visits to her people in Altona lasted up to four weeks.

In spring and summer of 1940, the Berlin "Euthanasia” agency at Tiergartenstrasse 4 planned a special operation to eliminate all Jewish patients living in public and private mental hospitals in Germany. The agency had all Jewish patients of the institutions registered and then assembled in so-called collecting institutions. In northern Germany, this was the Hamburg-Langenhorn mental hospital. All institutions in Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg were ordered to transfer all their Jewish patients there before September 18, 1940.

Maria Warburg was taken to Langenhorn on September 12, 1940. Her guardian, the attorney Möller at Rathausstrasse 27 in Hamburg, wrote to the Neustadt hospital requesting her discharge to "family care.” The Neustadt management took up the proposal, and on September 21 wrote to the "Director of the Hamburg-Langenhorn Mental Hospital”, advocating Maria Warburg’s discharge from the institution. By that time, however, Maria’s fate had long been decided.

Two days later, on September 23, 1940, she and all other Jewish patients from north German mental hospitals were transported from Hamburg-Langenhorn to Brandenburg on the Havel, where they arrived the same day. In the part of the former prison that had been converted into a gas murdering facility, the newly arrived patients were immediately herded into the gas chamber and murdered by carbon monoxide gas. Only one patient, Ilse Herta Zachmann, temporarily escaped that fate (cf. there).

Maria Warburg’s entry in the birth register was amended stating that the "Chelm II Registrar’s Office” had recorded her death that had allegedly occurred on February 10, 1941 under the number 279/1941.

The people murdered in Brandenburg, however, had never been in the town east of Lublin called Chelm in Polish, Cholm in German. The mental hospital there had ceased to exist after SS troops had murdered almost all its patients on January 12, 1940. And there had never been a German registrar’s office in Chelm. It was solely invented to cover up the murder operations, and recording fictive later dates of death served the purpose of demanding board fees for the already murdered patients.

When Maria Warburg was transported to the killing facility in Brandenburg on the Havel, her brother Rudolf Warburg and his family had already fled from Germany. He had started looking after the family’s affairs latest after the death of Salomon Siegfried Warburg, his own and Maria’s father. Rudolf Warburg’s civil existence had been destroyed when the Nazi authorities deprived him of his office as notary public and his license as an attorney pursuant to the law on Citizenship of the Reich and its subsequent ordinances.

Rudolf Warburg had absolved his military service as a one-year volunteer (an option for high school graduates who only had so serve one year as ensign) from October 1, 1912 to September 30, 1913. From August 1914, he took part in 23 skirmishes and battles as a Reserve Lieutenant and was wounded once. He was discharged from the army on October 28, 1918.

Rudolf Warburg, a Lutheran Protestant, married Ilse Gudrun Olshausen, likewise Lutheran. The couple had three children: Marion Helga; born February 3, 1926, Renata Margarete, born October 29, 1927, and Ruth Erika Warburg, born February 29, 1932.

Rudolf Warburg followed the professional footsteps of his forbears, studied Law and received his doctorate from the University of Kiel in August 1921. In July 1923, he was admitted to the Bar at the District Court and the Court of Appeals in Altona. After their marriage in 1925, Rudolf and Ilse Gudrun moved from Altona to Nienstedten, Hindenburgstrasse 23 (from 1938 von-Seeckt-Strasse, now Winckelmannstrasse) and in 1926 to a house of their own in Blankenese, Caprivistrasse 36. His law office remained in Altona, at Platz der Republik. On December 3, 1927, he was also appointed as notary public.

As a notary public, Rudolf Warburg took the oath of office to Adolf Hitler pursuant to Art. 2 of the Law on the Adjuration of Officials and Soldiers of the Wehrmacht of August 20, 1934 on August 27, 1934. But neither his oath to the "Führer” nor his membership in the Lutheran Church protected him from racial persecution bei the Nazis. On January 22, 1936, the Reich Minister of Justice informed Warburg that "pursuant to Art 3 of the Law on Citizenship of the Reich in connection with Art. 4, paragraph 1 of its first associated ordinance of November 14, (RGBl. I p. 1333), you have been released from your office as notary public effective the end of November 14, 1935.”

On December 23, 1935, Rudolf Warburg filed a voluminous petition with the Reich Minister of Justice, in which he narrated the family history during the course of centuries and its merits to the benefit of the German community, and asked to remain in the office of Notary Public. The petition was rejected.

On December 9, 1938, Rudolf Warburg’s name was struck from the roll of the attorneys admitted to the Altona District Court with reference to the fifth ordinance of the Law on Citizenship of the Reich of September 27, 1938. Instead, he was admitted as "Konsulent” in the district of the Hamburg Court of Appeals at the beginning of 1939. From 1938 to 1945 in the German Reich, the title "Konsulent” was given Jewish attorneys who had been deprived of their general license as lawyers, but received the permission to counsel or represent other Jews in a few remaining types of affairs.

Rudolf Warburg now saw no future for himself and his family in Germany. In December 1938, his daughters travelled to England.

After the pogrom of November 9/10, he was forced to sell the family property in Caprivistrasse far below its actual value in order to pay the "Reich flight tax” and the "atonement tribute.” In April 1939, Rudolf Warburg and his wife Ilse Gudrun followed their daughters to London. The family later settled in Surrey, southern England.

Maria Warburg’s uncle Albert Warburg and his wife Gertrude "Gertha” Maria, née Rindskopf, a citizen of the Netherlands born November 23, 1856, had four children: Helene Julie, born September 10, 1877; Ada Sophie, born September 11, 1878; Betty, born September 27, 1881, and Wilhelm Siegfried, born April 7, 1884, who died at the age of seven.

Gertrude Margaretha and her daughters Helene Julie and Betty Warburg were murdered in the Holocaust. Gertrude Margaretha Warburg had fled to the Netherlands, from where she was deported to the Sobibor death camp in Poland in 1943. Helene Julie Warburg had married the lawyer Walter Edgar Burchard, a member of the Reformed Christian church. On July 10, 1942, the day before the scheduled deportation of his wife Helene Julie, he took his own life.

Ada Sophie, who had married the engineer Ernst Eduard Martienssen, a Lutheran, had been imprisoned at Hamburg Fuhlsbüttel in May June 1940 for "listening to an enemy radio station.” She was deported to Theresienstadt on January 19, 1940. She survived and returned to Hamburg, where she died in 1957.

Betty Warburg was murdered in Sobibor on April 16, 1943. Her detailed biography is available at www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de, where the history of this branch of the Warburg family is also portrayed in detail.

A Stumbling Stone at Palmaille 108 in the old town of Hamburg-Altona commemorates Maria Warburg.

Stumbling Stones at Feldbrunnenstrasse 21 in Hamburg-Rotherbaum, commemorate Walter Edgar and Helene Julie Burchard, Stumbling Stones at Hochallee 5 in Hamburg-Rotherbaum Gertrude Margaretha Warburg and Betty Warburg.

Translation by Peter Hubschmid
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: March 2020
© Ingo Wille

Quellen: 1; 4; 5; 7; 9; StaH zwanzigerStaatsarchiv III, 3171-2/4 U.A. 4, Liste psychisch kranker jüdischer Patientinnen und Patienten der psychiatrischen Anstalt Langenhorn, die aufgrund nationalsozialistischer "Euthanasie"-Maßnahmen ermordet wurden, zusammengestellt von Peter von Rönn, Hamburg (Projektgruppe zur Erforschung des Schicksals psychisch Kranker in Langenhorn); 213-13 Landgericht Wiedergutmachung 2946 Rudolf Warburg, 2947 Rudolf Warburg; 241-2 Justizverwaltung Personalakten A 3569 Rudolf Warburg; 332-5 Standesämter 6298 Geburtsregister Nr. 2708/1877 Helene Julie Warburg, 6169 Geburtsregister Nr. 1480/1891 Anna Helene Warburg, 6282 Geburtsregister Nr. Nr. 3309/1893 Pius Moritz Rudolf Warburg, 8180 Sterberegister Nr. 327/1942 Eduard Walter Edgar Burchard, 5966 Heiratsregister Nr. 530/1905 Eduard Walter Edgar Burchard/Helene Julie Warburg, 8545 Heiratsregister Nr. 16/1890 Salomon genannt Siegfried Warburg/Anna Elisabeth Brandis, 8090 Sterberegister Nr. 553/1927 Ernst Eduard Martienssen, 5395 Sterberegister Nr. 757/1934 Salomon genannt Siegfried Warburg, 6203 Geburtsregister Nr. 2573/1878 Ada Sophie Warburg, 5980 Heiratsregister Nr. 556/1908 Ernst Eduard Martienssen/Ada Sophie Warburg, 6218 Geburtsregister Nr. 2656/1881 Betty Warburg, 6288 Geburtsregister Nr. 874/1895 Carl Otto Albert Warburg, 6295 Heiratsregister Nr. 2740/1896 Emma Maria Amalie Warburg, 5186 Sterberegister Nr. 991/1886 Moritz Warburg, 6016 Heiratsregister Nr. 1212/1913 Max Heinrich Ernst Wolff/Sophie Charlotte Henriette Warburg, 6276 Geburtsregister Nr. 2226/1892 Sophie Charlotte Henriette Warburg, 6231 Sterberegister Nr. 1020/1884 Albert Warburg, 5211 Sterberegister Nr. 1097/1892 Wilhelm Siegfried Warburg; 332-8 Meldekarte Siegfried Warburg; 351-11 Amt für Wiedergutmachung 3440 Ada Martienssen geb. Warburg, Helene Burchard geb. Warburg; UKE/IGEM, Archiv, Patienten-Karteikarte Maria Warburg der Staatskrankenanstalt Friedrichsberg; UKE/IGEM, Archiv, Patientenakte Maria Warburg der Staatskrankenanstalt Friedrichsberg; Landesarchiv Schleswig (LAS) Abt. 377 Nr. 10986 Maria Warburg.
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