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Hanni Gumprecht * 1927

Wilstorfer Straße 43 (Harburg, Harburg)

HIER WOHNTE
HANNI GUMPRECHT
JG. 1927
DEPORTIERT 1941
RIGA
ERMORDET
STUTTHOF

further stumbling stones in Wilstorfer Straße 43:
Elfriede Gumprecht

Elfriede Gumprecht, née Süßkind, born 26 Dec. 1888 in Hamburg, deported 6 Dec. 1941 to Riga, died 2 Jan. 1945 in the Stutthof Concentration Camp
Hanni Gumprecht, born 25 Mar. 1927 in Goslar, deported 6 Dec. 1941 to Riga, transferred to the Stutthof Concentration Camp, date of death unknown

Wilstorfer Straße 43, Harburg-Altstadt

Elfriede Süßkind was the eldest child of the Jewish couple Hulda, née Schlachcic (*31 Aug. 1890), and Isaak Süßkind (*2 Nov. 1860). Her sister Gertrud (*15 Apr. 1890) was two years younger, and her brother Walter (*21 Nov. 1894) six years younger.

Elfriede married John Gumprecht (9 July 1880) on 22 October 1909, but she was widowed soon thereafter. John Gumprecht was drafted to serve in the First World War, and was wounded so badly in the fighting at Bois-le-Prêtre in Lorraine that he died in the Noveant field hospital shortly after his 35th birthday.

Elfriede was unable to run her husband’s business, and found work in the offices of the Hamburg police department. In August 1924 she moved to Harburg and joined the Jewish Community there. Her daughter Hanni was born on 25 March 1927 in Goslar. The father was Walter Epstein, but nothing more is known about him. Hanni lived with her mother in Harburg.

On 1 August 1929, Elfriede Gumprecht opened a lamp store at Wilstorfer Straße 39 in Harburg. She had apparently found a market niche, since her profits quickly rose above all expectations, and, only a few months later, she was able to move into an elegant 6-room apartment at Wilstorfer Straße 43 and to hire a housekeeper.

The developments in 1933 did not immediately influence her situation. Despite the anti-Jewish measures and harassment, Elfriede Gumprecht still saw rising profits from her business in the first few years of the Nazi regime.

Jewish retailers were, however, increasingly pressured out of business with countless stipulations and regulations, and in the spring of 1938 she was finally forced to give up her business and sell it, far under market value, to "Aryan” owners. The loss of her livelihood resulted in dramatic changes to her life style.

She could no longer afford the apartment on Wilstorfer Straße, and had to move to a much smaller one at Parkallee 6 in Hamburg. She had to sell a large part of her furniture and household goods far below their value. She supported herself and her daughter with her savings, to which, however, she only had limited access after the Foreign Exchange Office of the Chief Tax Authority had placed a security order on her accounts. She was granted access to a fixed monthly sum to cover her basic living expenses. For anything beyond that, she had to submit a special request and explicitly justify her reasons for the expenditure – for example the sum of 31.20 Reichsmarks that she requested in February 1940, when the temperature dropped to -40° and she and her daughter spent three days in a hotel because their apartment was unheated.
Elfriede also supported her parents with her savings. She gave them 45 RM per month through the welfare office of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany. It was probably the worry about the fate of her elderly parents and the strict constraints placed on her by the Chief Tax Authority that prevented her from leaving the country, as her siblings had done in early 1939.

When Jewish children were banned from all public schools, Hanni Gumprecht transferred from the Harburg Secondary School for Girls "Am Soldatenfriedhof” to the Israelitic Girls’ School in Hamburg.

Beginning in September 1941, she and her mother were required to wear the "Yellow Star” in public. Three months later they received orders from the Hamburg Gestapo to appear at the appointed meeting place on Moorweidenstraße on 6 December 1941 to be "evacuated” to Riga.

The train which took Elfriede and Hanni Gumprecht to Riga stopped, after three days, just short of its destination at the Skirotava freight yard, because the purge at the Riga Ghetto – i.e. the mass shooting of those Jews who had already been assigned to the ghetto – was not yet completed and the rooms were not yet free for new arrivals. The 753 Jews from Hamburg were herded to the Jungfernhof Camp, one mile away, where 3000 deportees from Nuremburg, Stuttgart, and Vienna had already arrived. The horrific living conditions there claimed more than 800 lives in the following weeks, and the number of deaths continued to rise. Elfreide and Hanni Gumprecht escaped the numerous massacres in the following years, probably because they were considered fit for work. When the Ghetto and the concentration camps in the region were evacuated in the summer of 1944 when the Red Army reached Latvia, Elfriede and Hanni, with a large group of other women, were put on a ship to Gotenhafen (present-day Gdynia), and sent from there to the Stutthof Concentration Camp, which was in no way prepared for such an influx of new prisoners.

Hanni Gumprecht’s short life ended in this concentration camp near Gdansk. The exact date and the circumstances of her death are unknown. Her mother died on 2 January 1945.

Translator: Amy Lee

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

© Klaus Möller

Quellen: 1; 2 (R 1939/423); 4; 5; 6; 8; StaH, 351-11, AfW, Abl. 2008/1, 261288, neu: 10877, Adressbuch Harburg 1935; Angrick/Klein, "Endlösung", S. 185ff.; Brämer, Carlebach, S. 177ff.; Gillis-Carlebach, Einzi­ges, S. 322ff.; Ephraim-Carlebach-Sitftung (Hrsg.), Carlebachs, S. 78ff.; Katz, Erinnerungen.
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