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Anna Kaufmann (née Goldschmidt) * 1889

Großer Schippsee 44 (Harburg, Harburg)

HIER WOHNTE
ANNA KAUFMANN
GEB. GOLDSCHMIDT
JG. 1889
DEPORTIERT 1942
ERMORDET IN
RIGA

Anna Kaufmann, née Goldschmidt, born on 19 Dec. 1889 in Harburg, deported on 25 Jan. 1942 from Berlin to Riga, murdered

Harburg-Altstadt, Grosser Schippsee 44 (formerly Brückenstrasse 5)

Anna Goldschmidt was born as the daughter of the Jewish house, money and commodities broker Robert Goldschmidt and his wife Rosa, née Goldmann, shortly after the two villages of Heimfeld and Wilstorf had been incorporated into the city of Harburg. Brückenstrasse (today part of Grosser Schippsee), where her parents lived, crossed the Seeve Canal, which was later filled up in this area, and connected Grosser Schippsee with Bahnhofsstrasse (today Schellerdamm). The street was densely populated in those days.

Little is known about Anna Goldschmidt’s subsequent life, and we have no information about her childhood and adolescence. She later married Oskar Kaufmann (born on 25 July 1879), who came from a Jewish family in Berlin. The young couple settled in the Reich capital, and Oskar and Anna Kaufmann still lived there when the first deportation trains left the city in the fall of 1941.

On 25 Jan. 1942, they were among the 1,044 Jews deported from Berlin to the former Latvian capital of Riga. The journey lasted five days, and when the freight train arrived at its destination in the freezing cold, many of the participants in the transport had already frozen to death and others were so exhausted that they were immediately shot while unloading in Riga Skirotava.

Those who could still stand on their feet were driven to the city’s "Moscow Quarter,” where the German occupiers had already built a ghetto for about 30,000 local Jews on an area of 9,000 square meters (some 2 acres) in Aug. 1941. Shortly before the first Jews from the territory of the German Reich arrived in Riga, about 27,500 Latvian ghetto residents had been shot dead during the "Riga Bloody Sunday” ("Rigaer Blutsonntag,” also known as Rumbula Massacre on 30 Nov. 1941) and on 8 Dec. 1941 to create "room” for the new arrivals. In the weeks and months that followed, this fate also befell many German Jews who were declared unfit for work during one of the many "selections.” Among the victims in the first months were many mothers with children and, time and again, elderly and sick people.

Anna and Oskar Kaufmann were not among the 13 people of the tenth Berlin Transport to the East (10. Berliner Osttransport) who survived the Holocaust.

Translator: Erwin Fink
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: June 2020
© Klaus Möller

Quellen: Hamburger jüdische Opfer des Nationalsozialismus. Gedenkbuch, Jürgen Sielemann, Paul Flamme (Hrsg.), Hamburg 1995; Gedenkbuch. Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933–1945, Bundesarchiv (Hrsg.), Koblenz 2006; Yad Vashem. The Central Database of Shoa Victims´ Names: www.yadvashem.org; Harburger Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Bezirksamt Harburg (Hrsg.), Hamburg 2003; Alfred Gottwald, Diana Schulle, Die `Judendeportationen´ aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–1945, Wiesbaden 2005; Albert Holtz, Horst Homann, Die Straßennamen von Harburg, Hamburg 1970; www.statistik-des-holocaust.de/list_ger_ber_ot10.html; Helms-Museum, Harburger Adressbücher; Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein, Die `Endlösung´ in Riga. Ausbeutung und Vernichtung 1941–1944, Darmstadt 2006.