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Selma Sussmann
© Privatbesitz

Selma Sussmann (née Gerolstein) * 1889

Magdalenenstraße 28 (Eimsbüttel, Rotherbaum)

1941 Riga

further stumbling stones in Magdalenenstraße 28:
Leopold Sussmann

Selma Sussmann, née Gerolstein, born on 21.10.1889, deported to Riga on 6.12.1941, missing there

Magdalenenstraße 28

Selma Gerolstein was born in Limburg/Lahn on October 21, 1889, the second daughter of Joseph and Johannette Gerolstein. The family lived in Limburg, Fischmarkt No. 6, and Selma's parents were Jewish. Her father had run a kosher butcher's shop since 1889. He had also taken over an inn from his father-in-law (which now exists as the "Zum Burgkeller” restaurant), which he sold in 1911. When Selma was born in 1889, her older sister Bella was five years old.

On September 4, 1903, Selma, who was almost 14 years old, was given a big task at a major event for the Jewish Community and the town, the inauguration of the New Synagogue: she was allowed to hand over the keys. The "Nassauer Bote” reported: "A rare celebration caused the citizens of our town yesterday, namely the citizens of all denominations, to decorate their houses with flags, namely the inauguration of the new Israelite synagogue. [Selma Gerolstein presented the keys to the architect Mr. Spahr with a short dedication. He handed them over to Mayor Kauter, who then presented them to District Rabbi Dr. Weingarten, expressing the wish that the new house of God would serve the blessing and well-being of the community, the town and the entire fatherland.”

Like her sister Bella, Selma probably also attended the Protestant secondary school for girls, colloquially known as the Thau School after the principal.

In 1911, the following entry can be found in the Limburg city address book: Sussmann Leopold, Regierungs-Baumeister, Neumarkt 10, II. The building also housed the Mayer siblings' department store, which was run by the Jewish Putzinger family and "Aryanized” in 1935. Leopold Sussmann (for a biography, see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de) worked at the Limburg Machine and Workshop Inspection Department for the Royal Railway Directorate in Frankfurt am Main on the use of oil firing in locomotives and published on the subject.

The young Selma probably met him, her future husband, in Limburg. Like her, the graduate engineer Leopold Sussmann came from a Jewish family and belonged to a Jewish Community throughout his life. He was born on March 6, 1876 in Wendisch-Buchholz and grew up there, in Bad Muskau and Berlin. He passed his school-leaving exams in Berlin, studied engineering and began his career with the Reichsbahn, for which he - and Selma with him later on - had to change his place of residence several times. On April 1, 1912, Leopold Sussmann was promoted to Reichsbahn councillor. Six weeks later, on May 21, 1912, the 36-year-old married 22-year-old Selma in Berlin.

At the time, Leopold Sussmann was already employed in Stettin as an acceptance builder at the Vulkanwerke. Seven months after the marriage, on December 23, 1912, his young wife gave birth to their daughter Flora Käthe. Leopold's mother Flora and his sister Käthe were probably the namesakes. The family lived at Pestalozzistrasse 21 on the first floor.

At the beginning of April 1914, the Reichsbahn gave Leopold Sussmann the position of director of the railroad office department 4 in Bromberg. The small family moved and settled at Danziger Straße 120. Presumably during her time there, Selma Sussmann gave birth to another child, who died at the age of 4. The family's third child, Peter Gerhard, was born in Bromberg on November 12, 1918.

After the First World War, Polish inhabitants of the province of Poznan fought for integration into Poland, which went down in history as the Poznan Uprising. The Treaty of Versailles stipulated that most of the province of Poznan was to be ceded to Poland. Many German residents left the area as a result, including the Sussmann family, who moved to Frankfurt in 1920, where Leopold Sussmann was given a position as head of the railroad workshop office near Nied.

From 1922 to 1923, Leopold Sussmann can be found in the Frankfurt address book under the address Eppsteiner Str. 33 and in 1924 as a government building officer and member of Department III of the Frankfurt Reichsbahn Directorate. During this time, on April 29, 1922, Selma's father Joseph Gerolstein died in Limburg, which was reported to the authorities by Selma's sister Bella, who, married to the non-Jewish butcher August Kaffai, was still living in the town. Eight years later, in 1930, Selma's mother Johannette Gerolstein also died there in the Bethlehem Convent retirement home.

Leopold Sussmann was highly specialized in his field of heating management and in the optimization of work processes, so that he was given a management position in Department 63 for heating management in the Managing Directorate of Workshops for the districts of the Reichsbahn directorates in Altona, which was also responsible for Hanover, Münster (Westphalia), Oldenburg and Schwerin. So the family moved again, this time to the vicinity of Hamburg. From 1926, they lived in their own semi-detached villa in the suburb of Othmarschen, Gottorpstraße 14 (which belonged to Hamburg from 1938). Selma Sussmann was 37 years old, her children Flora Käthe 14 years old and her son Peter Gerhard 8 years old. Leopold Sussmann had been able to use the title of Reichsbahn Oberrat since 1927.
As was not unusual among the upper middle classes, Selma Sussmann had a governess for the children and a cook and laundress to help with the housework.

At the age of 15, daughter Flora Käthe went her own religious way. She was confirmed on Palm Sunday 1928 in the Protestant Christuskirche Othmarschen, after being baptized there in February of that year.
After elementary school at the Bertalyzeum in Groß Flottbek, their son Peter Gerhard attended the Christianeum in Othmarschen from 1929.

After graduating from high school, Käthe Flora went to study in Munich in 1931. In order to escape the anti-Semitic atmosphere there, she moved to Paris with her non-Jewish fiancé, the medical student Ferdinand Otto Fischer. In France, Käthe experienced a turbulent and dangerous escape with arrests. She was able to go into hiding under the name Edith Schmidt. In the end, she worked for the Résistence in the commune of Die in the Drôme department.
Her parents were still able to support her financially until 1938, and until then they spent family vacations together in Denmark. Käthe and her parents saw each other for the last time in 1938, after Käthe's passport had been revoked in Hamburg. Leopold Sussmann had provided her with foreign currency for a return ticket to Paris.

The year 1933 radically changed the lives of the Sussmann family in Hamburg. Among other things, the National Socialists dismissed Jewish civil servants under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service and gave early retirement to those who had been civil servants before 1914. Leopold Sussmann submitted his application for retirement on January 1, 1934, which was approved by the Director General of the Deutsche Reichsbahngesellschaft on September 19, 1933, with a pension of 561.42 Reichsmark.

This meant significant economic restrictions. The family had to move from their own house in Othmarschen to a rented apartment in the Rotherbaum district, at Magdalenenstraße 28. The family was registered here from June 13, 1936, and in 1940 "Sussmann, Leop., Oberbaurat i.R., Magdalenenstraße 28” can be found for the last time in the Hamburg address book.

At Easter 1937, Peter Gerhard Sussmann was able to pass his school-leaving examination at the Christianeum early. On April 15, he enrolled at the University of Hamburg in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences to study physics. His enrolment document was yellow, as this color code was used to identify Jewish students from 1935 onwards. Peter Gerhard Sussmann had rightly entered "German” under "ethnicity”. This was deleted and replaced by "Jew”.

In the course of the arrests of Jewish men after the November pogrom of 1938, Leopold and Peter Gerhard Sussmann were also taken into custody and deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After both were released, 20-year-old Peter Gerhard applied to emigrate to the USA via England in February 1939 to continue his physics studies. As he was not yet of age, his father Leopold had to approve the application. Peter Gerhard was able to flee to England via Denmark in mid-March 1939. He carried his parents' documents with him. The plan was for them to follow him. They were not to succeed.

They received the deportation order in Hamburg for December 6, 1941. This transport had originally been scheduled to depart two days earlier for the Minsk ghetto, but was postponed. As mass shootings were still taking place in the Riga ghetto, the Hamburg train - like the trains from Stuttgart, Nuremberg and Vienna - was directed to the makeshift camp on the Jungfernhof estate.
The train from Hamburg traveled to the Šķirotava goods station, from where the prisoners were driven through deep snow to the satellite camp 1.5 km to the south. Hundreds of people died there due to hunger, cold and lack of medical care, and most of those who survived until spring 1942 fell victim to a mass shooting on March 26, 1942, known as Aktion Dünamünde.

Leopold and Selma Sussmann did not survive. Whether they starved to death, froze to death, died in other ways or were shot cannot be determined due to a lack of documents.

As late as 1953, the restitution files of the Hamburg district court still state that Leopold and Selma Sussmann were "evacuated to Riga”.

In 1988, a memorial stele was erected at Limburg's Jewish cemetery bearing the names of the Jewish citizens of Limburg who were murdered under National Socialism. The town's daughter, Selma Sussmann, is also commemorated here.

Their children Flora Käthe and Peter Gerhard survived: Flora Käthe, Kathe McPhail, lived to be 100 years old, Peter Gerhard died in Wales in 1999. Both left behind children and grandchildren.

Selma's sister Bella had married the Catholic butcher August Kaffai in Limburg on May 14, 1906 and converted to her husband's Catholic faith. The couple had three children, Anna Maria, Peter and Else Elisabeth.
After the death of her husband August in October 1938, Bella and her unmarried daughter Else Elisabeth fled to the USA in August 1939 to join their son Peter, who had already emigrated in the summer of 1933 with his young wife Elsie, née Milbrandt, and lived in her birthplace Buffalo, NY. He too had learned the trade of butcher. Shortly before they left Germany, the family members were registered in the census on 17 May 1939 and categorized as Jewish (Bella) and half-Jewish (the daughters) in accordance with Nazi racial laws. Bella Kaffai died on July 13, 1966 in Buffalo at the age of 82.

Daughter Anna Maria, married name Wicker, survived in Germany.

Translation: Beate Meyer
Stand: December 2024
© Dorothea Thünken-Klemperer

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