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Alfred Issak Preis * 1885

Dovenfleet 5 (Hamburg-Mitte, Hamburg-Altstadt)

HIER WOHNTE
ALFRED ISSAK PREIS
JG. 1885
DEPORTIERT 1943
THERESIENSTADT
1944 AUSCHWITZ
ERMORDET

Alfred Isaak Preis, born 29.3.1885 in Kaiserslautern, deported on 9.6.1943 to Theresienstadt, further deported on 28.10.1944 to Auschwitz

Dovenfleet 5 (Kallmorgen Tower) (formerly Dovenfleet 40)

The merchant Alfred Preis, son of Adolph and Hermine Preis, née Goetz (Götz) (born 20.2.1859 in Heltersberg), came from Kaiserslautern, where his parents had married on June 13, 1884. His father had apparently died before the First World War, his mother Hermine on March 2, 1940 in Mannheim after a "streetcar accident”.

Alfred Preis initially lived with his wife Christine, née Schülpen (born 31.12.1889), who came from a non-Jewish family, in her native city of Düsseldorf, where the 1911 address book listed him at Remscheiderstraße 5. Alfred Preis went off to fight in the First World War in 1914 and was discharged from the army in 1916 with honors, but also as a "seriously wounded soldier”. His son Paul Peter, born on April 19, 1910, was six years old at the time. Daughter Hermine Elisabeth was born on April 19, 1917.
In 1933, Alfred Preis took over as director of the Bergisches Kraftfutterwerk Hermann Schmidt KG branch in Düsseldorf harbor. After announcing his Jewish origins, he was dismissed at the beginning of 1939. The Preis family left Düsseldorf and moved to Hamburg, to the third floor of Dovenfleet 40. They had to cut back financially, as Alfred Preis could no longer find any other gainful employment.

His son Paul, who worked as a commercial employee for Mercedes-Büromaschinen Werke A.G., was drafted into military service in 1939 and discharged as a private in 1941 as "unworthy of military service” because of his Jewish father. In the 1940s, he was conscripted as a "construction helper” and had to carry out clearing work in rubble areas under life-threatening conditions until he was seriously injured.

His sister, called Liesel, had already been refused admission to drama school in Düsseldorf in 1933 as a "half-Jew”. An attempt to obtain an exemption from the Minister of Propaganda in Berlin was unsuccessful. Anyone who was not accepted into the Reich Chamber of Culture was effectively banned from the profession. Liesel joined a traveling revue troupe, as the International Artists' Lodge, unlike the Reich Chamber of Culture, did not require "proof of Aryan origin”. She performed in England and France until she was forced to return to Germany. She was unable to obtain a residence permit abroad.

In May 1943, Alfred Preis was arrested by Gestapo officers Walter Wohlers (born 5.5.1902) and Walter Mecklenburg (born 28.7.1909, suicide 1947) after a house search in the apartment on Dovenfleet. Both were employees of the detective inspector and SS-Hauptsturmführer Claus Göttsche (born May 17, 1899, suicide in 1945), head of Department II B, also known as the "Jewish Department”.

In 1946, Paul Preis told the Committee of Former Political Prisoners that his father was probably arrested at the instigation of Riedel, an official at the Kohlhöfen employment office. Although Alfred Preis lived in a "privileged mixed marriage”, which actually offered him a certain degree of protection, he was deported from an unnamed prison to the Theresienstadt ghetto on June 9, 1943 and from there to Auschwitz on October 28, 1944. A survivor named Levy, who had been on the same transport from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, testified after the Second World War that all of the approximately 1,600 people, apart from six who arrived at the camp as fit for work, were immediately "gassed”. Alfred Preis, 59 years old and severely war-disabled, could not have "escaped this fate”, as his son further assumed. One month later, in November 1944, the dismantling of the killing facilities in Auschwitz began in order to leave no trace of the mass murders with Zyklon B.

Christine Preis was bombed out at Dovenfleet during the air raids on Hamburg in July/August 1943 ("Operation Gomorrah”). Everything she still owned was burnt in the firestorm.

Translation: Beate Meyer
Stand: November 2024
© Susanne Rosendahl

Quellen: StaH 351-11 AfW 8324 (Feltham, Liesel); StaH 351-11 AfW 53058 (Preis, Christel); StaH 351-11 AfW 8323 (Preis, Paul); StaH 522-1 Jüdische Gemeinde Nr. 992 e 2 Band 5; Diercks: Dokumentation Stadthaus, S. 38; Auskünfte von Herbert Diercks, Archiv der KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme, Komitee-Akte Preis, Bestand VVN; www.ancestry.de (Sterberegister Mannheim, Hermine Preis, Zugriff 17.2.2017); www.ancestry.de (Heiratsregister Kaiserslautern, Hermine Goetz und Adolph Preis, Zugriff 17.2.2017).