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Nann(y)i Hattendorf (née Lomnitz) * 1864

Hallerstraße 6 (Eimsbüttel, Rotherbaum)

1942 Theresienstadt
1942 weiterdeportiert nach Minsk

further stumbling stones in Hallerstraße 6:
Pauline Biram, Wally Daniel, Max Daniel, Alfred Friedensohn, Gertrud Friedensohn, Dr. Georg Sacke

Nanni Hattendorf, née Lomnitz, b. 3.17.1864 in Bischhausen/Oberhessen, deported on 7.15.1942 to Theresienstadt, murdered in Treblinka on 9.21.1942

Hallerstraße 6

The parents of Nanni Hattendorf, Menke Lomnitz and Karoline, née Nussbaum, lie buried in Bischhausen/Oberhessen in an old cemetery that belonged to the Jewish Congregation that existed there until 1920. The grave markers are in Hebrew on the front side and German on the back. The long-settled Lomnitz family owned a house and were considered prosperous cattle traders and butchers according to the dealers’ listings of 1786. The half-timbered house of their parents and forebears is still standing in Bischhausen and bears an inscription, which can also be seen on the homes of Christians: "GOD PROTECT THIS HOUSE AND ALL WHO ENTER HEREIN AND LEAVE AS FRIENDS, BUT MY ENEMIES TURN AWAY FROM HERE, OWNER OF THE HOME WOLF MENKE AND HIS WIFE PESGEN, THE 4TH OF JULY, IN THE YEAR 1785 ZM WVL”

Nanni Lomnitz married Moritz Hattendorf, from Oldenburg, who was a butcher by profession, and moved with him to Osternburg, a city district of Oldenburg. The house and the land it occupied at Bremer Strasse 58 belonged to the Hattendorfs. In two-year intervals, the couple had four daughters: Ella on 4.24.1896, Gretchen on 7.16. 1898, Frieda on 4.27.1900, and Emma on 3.20.1902.

Aside from Ella, the daughters married and left Oldenburg in the 1920s and 1930s: Gretchen went to Hanover in 1915, and later to Hamburg; Emma, who worked as a salesperson, went to Hildesheim in 1923; Frieda, likewise, a salesperson, went to Berlin in 1934. Their father died in Oldenburg on 11 October 1936.

Mother Nanni remained living with her oldest daughter in the Oldenburg house with attached garden. Daughter Ella had attended a higher girls’ school and worked until August 1936 as a sales clerk at the Lefeber Paint Factory in Oldenburg, and thereafter in other business situations. According to the testimony of her sister Emma for reparations proceedings, she was let go from the paint factory "on racial grounds.” The testimony of the factory owner, on the other hand, spoke of "her giving up work of her own volition.”

Ella, who handled the correspondence with officials on behalf of her mother, made various application to the Chief Financial Governor, in order to get money for living expenses from her blocked assets. An outstanding application in Oldenburg made to the Chief Financial Governor of the Weser/Ems region for an allowance of RM 150 was disallowed: "… because you live in a common household with your mother Mrs. Nanni Sara Hattendorf and your living expenses are drawn from the released amount for the above-named.”

Ella and Frieda had proprietorship of real estate in Hamburg: two developed pieces of property in Uhlenhorst, at Beethovenstrasse 19 and Humboldtstrasse 83. They were forced to sell both properties on 19 December 1938. The Finance Administration invoked §§ 8 and 9 of the decree of two weeks earlier, on 3 December 1938, concerning the disposition of Jewish assets – Reich Law Gazette, I, p. 1709. The revenues from the sale of real estate must, according to the decree, be immediately placed in a "secured account.” This ordinance was part of "Aryanization,” the systematic theft of Jewish assets by the National Socialist State.

In December 1939, Ella Hattendorf succeeded in getting an allowance of RM 1000 from her "secured account” transferred to her sister Frieda, who was living in Hanover, but, of course, it also had to be placed in a "secured account” of the National Socialist Foreign Exchange Office. Expropriation functioned seamlessly.

In April 1940, Nanni Hattendorf, together with Ella, had to leave Hamburg "for reasons of persecution.” Surplus furnishings were stored with the forwarding agency, Gaertner & Co., that is to say, sold off.

The clearing out of Jews from Oldenburg was on the initiative of the East Frisian governors, which ordered Jews to leave East Frisia by 1 April 1940. In any event, in April 1940, the East Frisian cities and rural communes – earlier than elsewhere in the Reich – reported that they were "Jew-free.” The surviving sister, Emma, confirmed this state of affairs in the justification of her claims as Ella’s heir: "… When Osternburg and the surrounding area, according to the persecution measures, was made Jew-free …”

In 1938, Grete Lewin ("Gretchen”), the second daughter, since divorced, lived in Hamburg at Sierichstrasse 153, working as a domestic for the book dealer Hugo Friedmann (b. 7.16.1882; see his biographical sketch).

The addresses of mother Nanni and daughter Ella, who lived together, changed inside a year in Hamburg from Werderstrasse 6 to "Ostmark” (Hallerstrasse) 6, and from there to Isestrasse 69. At this address a commemorative stone is placed for Ella Hattendorf.

In December 1941, Mother Nanni and her daughter were finally separated. Ella was deported to Riga-Jungfernhof on the transport of 6 December 1941.

Mother Nanni, over 65 years of age, was initially exempted from transportation to the East. She was instead supposed to be deported to the "Old People’s Ghetto” Theresienstadt. Thus, she moved one more time in Hamburg, into the "Jew house” at Benneckestrasse 6. From there, at age 78, she was deported on 15 July 1942 to Theresienstadt, and from there, on 21 September, as prisoner no. 190, to Treblinka, where she was murdered.

Four days later, Gretchen, her second daughter, followed her mother out of Hamburg to Theresienstadt on the transport of 19 July 1942. She lived there for nearly two years and, perhaps, in the beginning of her imprisonment in the fortress, saw her mother again. On 15 May 1944, Grete Lewin, as prisoner no. 1035, was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and murdered. On 20 July 1942, the third daughter, Frieda, was deported with her husband, Emil Mayer, from Cologne to Minsk and murdered there. Only the youngest daughter Emma, with her husband Karl Weinberg, an independent real estate broker in Hamburg, their six-year old daughter, and one-year old son succeeded in their timely flight to Bolivia in March 1939. In Bolivia, she told of a period of acclimatization, full of privation, depression, and sleep disorders. In 1956, she made an application for reparations, as the heir of her mother and her sisters, which was finally decided only in the 1970s. At most, she received from Germany a small pension for "occupational damages.”


Translator: Richard Levy
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.


Stand: September 2019
© Bruno Lowitsch

Quellen: 1; 5; 8; StaH 314-15 Oberfinanzpräsident 19028 und FVg 8690, 351-11 Amt für Wiedergutmachung -26113; Karl Kollmann, Wiegand, Spuren, Auskünfte und Führung in Bischhausen: Karl Kollmann; Stadtarchiv Oldenburg, Auskünfte Claus Ahrens; Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.de), Geschichte der Juden in Ostfriesland (eingesehen Dezember 2013).
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