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Paula Meyer, September 1930
© Privat

Paula Meyer (née Neuhaus) * 1882

Jungfrauenthal 12 (Eimsbüttel, Harvestehude)

Freitod (03.)05.12.1941

further stumbling stones in Jungfrauenthal 12:
Bruno Berger

Paula Meyer, née Neuhaus, born on 5 Sept. 1882 in Hamburg, suicide on 3 Dec. 1941 in Hamburg

Jungfrauenthal 12

Paula Bertha Neuhaus was born on 5 Sept. 1882 in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel at Schäferkampsallee 35. Her parents were the merchant Adolf Neuhaus (1851–1919) and his wife Lina Neuhaus, born in Aschaffenburg, née Trier (1860–1919), who were both later buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Hamburg-Ohlsdorf.

Adolf Neuhaus, born in Burgdorf/Hannover, had founded a brokerage firm for hides, skins, wool, and tanning agents under his own name in Hamburg in 1871; at the Hamburg Commodity Exchange, he had his pit "between Pf [pillar] 7 and 8a” for decades, as the directory noted, and he was also a member of the Hamburg Association of the "Honorable Merchant,” (e.E.K.). The company addresses were at Rödingsmarkt 81 (1880–1885), Rödingsmarkt 12 (1886–1899), and Brodschrangen 20 (from 1900). In 1881, Adolf Neuhaus had acquired Hamburg citizenship. The family’s residential addresses were Schäferkampsallee 35 (among other periods, 1878–1882), Schäferkampsallee 73 (1883–1885), Eichenallee 14 (1886), Rutschbahn 17 (1887–1897), Hartungstrasse 12/Harvestehude (1897–1914), and Parkallee 7 on the second floor (1914–1919).

In Apr. 1919, at the time of Adolf Neuhaus’ sudden death (suicide), his son Julius Neuhaus (born on 14 Jan. 1884 in Hamburg) and his brother-in-law Julius Trier held power of attorney for the company. Julius Trier (born on 13 Sept. 1865 in Aschaffenburg), authorized signatory since Jan. 1896, died of colon cancer in Aug. 1919 in the private Wünsch Clinic (Mittelweg 144). Julius Neuhaus continued the company and granted his sister Paula Meyer, née Neuhaus, power of attorney in Oct. 1919.

In July 1910, Paula Neuhaus had married in Hamburg the merchant Julius Albert Meyer (born on 19 May 1881 in Mainz), who had moved from Mainz to Hamburg on 31 Mar. 1910. A few days before his move, he had been issued a military passport in Mainz, where he had completed his military service in the infantry in 1906. His parents Friedrich Meyer (1842–1908) and Mathilde Meyer, née Bach (1855–1934), resided in Mainz, where his father worked as a wine merchant. It is not known where Paula and Julius Meyer’s four-week honeymoon in July/Aug. 1910 led them. Since they did not stay in Hamburg during this time, the resident’s registration office noted their absence and the reason.

Paula and Julius Meyer had two children: Annemarie (born on 23 Apr. 1912 in Hamburg) and Ernst Fritz (born on 5 Oct. 1915 in Hamburg). The family lived at Eppendorfer Baum 6 (Harvestehude) from Aug. 1910 to Sept. 1913.

In Apr. 1910, Julius Meyer had taken over the Max Eulenburg spirits wholesale company (founded in 1867, dealing in rectified spirits, fusel oil, etc.) after the death of the company owner Maximilian Eulenburg (1841–1909) as sole owner and he continued the enterprise under the name of Max Eulenburg Nachf. [Succrs.]. His father-in-law Adolf Neuhaus had joined the company as a limited partner investing 20,000 marks and he was liable only up to this amount – unlike the general partner Julius Meyer. One week after the beginning of the First World War, Paula Meyer was granted power of attorney for the business, which was entered in the company register.

The course of mobilization on 2 Aug. 1914 also saw the formation of the Hessian Infantry Regiment 118, to which 33-year-old Julius Meyer was assigned. As a deputy officer of the 11th Company in Replacement Battalion of Reserve Infantry Regiment 118, he took part in fighting in the Balkans in the fall of 1915. On 2 Nov. 1915, he died of a shot in the head at the Semendria (Smederevo) field hospital in Serbia. On his marriage and death certificate as well as on his residents’ registration card, "non-denominational” ("freireligiös”) was noted under religion.

After the death of her husband, Paula Meyer continued the company. The legal form of a limited partnership (KG) was cancelled in 1921 and the company was continued by Paula Meyer as a sole proprietorship. One may assume that the passports issued for her in 1916, 1917, 1920, and 1924 were used for business trips. As the company owner, she also attended the Hamburg Commodity Exchange herself (the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce also had a department for rectified spirit on the board of the exchange). From 1910 to 1938, Otto Heinrich August Geertz was the authorized signatory of the company.

Due to boycotts, administrative obstacles, and the withdrawal of the stock exchange listing, the entrepreneurial scope of action and sales became increasingly limited after Jan. 1933. At the instigation of the monopoly administration for spirits, the company was sold for a price significantly below market value. In Apr. 1938, Bruno Hahn took over the business and resold it to Otto Geertz and Walter Geertz (born in 1904 in Altona) as early as Sept. 1938. The state agency commissioned with this task tied this transaction to a clear commitment to the Nazi state. Walter Geertz described this process at the end of the 1940s as follows: "In 1938, I became co-owner of the Max Eulenburg Nachfolger Company in Hamburg. The main customs office in St. Annen demanded that I join the Nazi party. Since I refused, the trading license was revoked and I myself was forced to hand over the company to a long-standing party member.” The sale was apparently reversed, since the company register announcement was published in the press as early as 18 Oct. 1938, indicating that the owner of the company, Bruno Hahn, had sold the enterprise to Hermann Otto Scheehl (born on 17 July 1905 in Hamburg); the individual power of attorney for Otto Geertz remained in effect until Feb. 1939. In Aug. 1941, the company name was changed from "Max Eulenburg Nachf. Inh. H. O. Scheehl” to "Hermann O. Scheehl.” Hermann Scheehl (resident in Hoisdorf/ Stormarn District since 1935) had joined the Nazi party (NSDAP) on 1 Dec. 1932. (To the denazification committee, in 1947 he gave as his year of entry as 1933 and he concealed his SA membership). Shortly after him joining the party and the NSDAP’s assumption of power, he was able to transfer to Hamburgische Elektrizitätswerke (HEW), the Hamburg electric utility, as a salaried employee, almost doubling his salary. With the company takeover in 1938, his annual income soared from an average of 2,800 RM to about 13,000 RM.

Paula Meyer resided at Jungfrauenthal 12 on the third floor since Sept. 1913. From 1933 onward, she too was subjected to systematic disenfranchisement, humiliation, and financial plundering. She was forcibly listed as a member of the Jewish Community, whose independence had already been revoked by the state. In late 1941, the Nazi regime stopped the emigration of Jews from Germany and began deporting them to the conquered eastern territories. Paula Meyer also received the deportation order. When it was delivered to her, she took an overdose of Barbital (Veronal) tablets in her apartment on 2 or 3 Dec. 1941. The general practitioner called in, Max Sohege (Oderfelderstrasse 40), had her taken to the Israelite Hospital (Johnsallee 68), where she died on 5 Dec. 1941.

An officer of the 3rd Office of the Police Department sealed her apartment. The District Court (Amtsgericht) appointed the former attorney Morris Samson (1878–1959) (Ferdinandstrasse 75) (Ferdinandstrasse 75), by then permitted to practice as a "legal adviser” ("Konsulent”) for Jewish clients only, as the curator of the estate and executor of the will.

Paula Meyer’s son Ernst Fritz Meyer (born on 5 Oct. 1915 in Hamburg) attended the Heinrich Hertz Gymnasium until Mar. 1933, finished this high school with the intermediate secondary school certificate (mittlere Reife), and began a commercial apprenticeship on 1 Apr. 1933 at the long-established Arnold Otto Meyer import and export company (from and to East Asia), founded in 1857. The apprenticeship ended on 31 Mar. 1936, and it was foreseeable that, being Jewish in an "Aryan” company, he would have no career prospects and that his mother’s business, too, would eventually succumb to political impediments. In May 1936, he emigrated to Britain and worked as a trainee in a steel mill until 1939. In 1940, he joined the British army, which he only left in 1946.

Paula’s brother Julius Neuhaus (born on 14 Jan. 1884 in Hamburg) lived in his parents’ home in Hamburg until 1919. After the death of his parents in that year, he rented his own apartment. His residential addresses in the following years were Eppendorfer Baum 7 (1921), Uhlenhorster Weg 35 (1922–1930), Sierichstrasse 44/ Winterhude (1931–1934), and Sierichstrasse 108 (1935–1938). In the course of the NSDAP’s policy aimed at destroying economic livelihoods, he had to move repeatedly. For a time, he lived as a subtenant at Sierichstrasse 98 with the textile representative Emil Hammerschlag and his wife Alice Hammerschlag, née Wagner (both of whom were deported to the Minsk Ghetto on 8 Nov. 1941).

His daughter Ingrid Neuhaus (born in 1921) attended the private Firgau-Realschule, a secondary school for girls (Sierichstrasse 53), from 1927 to 1937, took a year-long course at the Jewish home economics school (Heimhuder Strasse 70, principal: Gertrud Pardo) with teacher Margot Massé in 1937, and a stenography and typewriting course at the Grone School in Oct. 1938. However, being Jewish, she was no longer allowed to take part in the latter course after Nov. 1938. Even before that, she had been denied further attendance at a higher state school for girls, participation in the high school graduation examination (Abitur), and admission to chemistry studies. She emigrated with her siblings to Britain in Feb. 1939. There she briefly began an apprenticeship as a tailor, then worked as a laboratory assistant, and began studying at a chemical technical college. In 1947, she emigrated to the USA, where she worked as a secretary and married three years later.

His daughter Annelore Neuhaus (born in 1923) attended the Lichtwark School (until Oct. 1935) and the girls’ secondary school of the Hamburg German-Israelitic Community (Oct. 1935 to Dec. 1938). She belonged to the Jewish sports association "Schild Hamburg” (gymnastics, athletics) founded by the Reich League of Jewish Frontline Soldiers (Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten) in May 1933 and took part in its nationwide athletics championship in Cologne on 14 Aug. 1938. In the same year, she represented her Jewish school at a competition, where she took second place in the triathlon. In Nazi Germany, she was denied her career aspirations as an academic sports teacher. She and her siblings left Nazi Germany on a children transport (Kindertransport) in Feb. 1939. In Britain, she completed her high school diploma (school certificate) at a private school in Oxford in 1940, but only received training as a home economics manager and then worked as a head cook. Later she emigrated to the USA.

After the eight-grade elementary school (Volksschule), his son Hans Adolf Neuhaus (born in 1925) had to attend the Talmud Tora School in Hamburg in 1935 under state pressure, and in 1939, he was taken to safety on a children transport. In Britain, he worked in a shoe factory from 1940 to 1944 instead of taking up studies as an electrical engineer as planned. The change of his German name to an English name, while retaining the initial letters, suggests his entry into the British Army, as in the case of his cousin Ernst Fritz Meyer, ten years his senior.

In May 1939, at the time of the German national census, Julius Neuhaus lived with his wife Marie Neuhaus, née Eisner (born on 13 Jan. 1892 in Sagan/Sprottau in Silesia) in Hamburg-Volksdorf at "Im Alten Dorfe 61.” The house, the "Liebermann-Villa,” belonged to Robert Liebermann (1883–1966), who had to rent out rooms due to anti-Jewish persecution. Their three children (13 years, 15 years, and 17 years old) had also been taken to safety in Feb. 1939 on a children transport to Britain. Likewise, the brother-in-law Ernst Eisner (born on 12 Mar. 1895 in Sagan), a lawyer and notary public from Berlin-Schöneberg (Landshuter Strasse 28), emigrated to Britain in Feb. 1939. He was only able to sell his apartment furnishings at a great loss ("I had to accept as payment what they gave me, i.e., only a fraction of the real value”), including oil paintings from auctions of the ducal palace in Sagan as well as from the Kaufmann collection of paintings in Berlin. The paternal company, Adolf Neuhaus, had been deleted from the company register in Apr. 1939, after the Nazi regime had caused a massive decline in business with boycotts and a strategy of economic marginalization, eventually forbidding its continued operation altogether. Starting in Sept. 1939, when Jews were forced to do forced labor, Julius Neuhaus was also used for "welfare work,” including gardening in the city park and, in Nov./Dec. 1939, for a few days on Moorredder in Volksdorf, where a shooting range was set up, a location where Siegmund Schenk (1872–1942/43) was also employed. Julius and Marie Neuhaus were deported to the Minsk Ghetto on 8 Nov. 1941. Stolpersteine were laid for them at Uhlenhorster Weg 35 (Uhlenhorst).

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

Stand: December 2020
© Björn Eggert

Quellen: Staatsarchiv Hamburg (StaH) 221-11 (Staatskommissar für die Entnazifizierung), Z 5196 (Hermann O. Scheehl); StaH 221-11 (Staatskommissar für die Entnazifizierung), L 240 (Walter Geertz); StaH 231-7 (Handelsregister), A 1 Band 4 (Adolf Neuhaus, HR A 1101); StaH 231-7 (Handelsregister), A 1 Band 16 (Max Eulenburg, HR A 4183); StaH 331-5 (Polizeibehörde – unnatürliche Sterbefälle), 1942/727 (Paula Meyer); StaH 332-5 (Standesämter), 8969 u. 3264/1882 (Geburtsregister 1882, Paula Neuhaus); StaH 332-5 (Standesämter), 8983 u. 254/1884 (Geburtsregister 1884, Julius Neuhaus); StaH 332-5 (Standesämter), 7997 u. 382/1909 (Sterberegister 1909, Max Eulenburg); StaH 332-5 (Standesämter), 8668 u. 202/1910 (Heiratsregister 1910, Julius Meyer u. Paula Neuhaus); StaH 332-5 (Standesämter), 8026 u. 833/1915 (Sterberegister 1915, Julius Meyer); StaH 332-5 (Standesämter), 8053 u. 302/1919 (Sterberegister 1919, Adolf Neuhaus); StaH 332-5 (Standesämter), 8054 u. 543/1919 (Sterberegister 1919, Julius Trier); StaH 332-5 (Standesämter), 8054 u. 589/1919 (Sterberegister 1919, Lina Neuhaus geb. Trier); StaH 332-7 (Staatsangehörigkeitsaufsicht), A I e 40 Bd. 10 (Bürgerregister 1876–1896, Ad. Neuhaus, Nr. 9928 am 26.8.1881); StaH 332-8 (Meldewesen), Alte Einwohnermeldekartei (1892–1925), K 6605 (Julius Meyer), K 6661 (Adolf Neuhaus, Lina Neuhaus geb. Trier); StaH 332-8 (Meldewesen), A 24 Band 134 (Reisepassprotokoll 1916, Nr. 2938, Paula Meyer); StaH 332-8 (Meldewesen), A 24 Band 159 (Reisepassprotokoll 1917, Nr. 15806, Paula Meyer); StaH 332-8 (Meldewesen), A 24 Band 238 (Reisepassprotokoll 1920, Nr. 46045, Paula Meyer); StaH 332-8 (Meldewesen), A 24 Band 309 (Reisepassprotokoll 1924, Nr. 7275, Paula Meyer); StaH 351-11 (Amt für Wiedergutmachung), 5569 (Paula Bertha Meyer); StaH 351-11 (AfW), 40580 (Ernst Fritz Meyer); StaH 351-11 (AfW), 7070 (Julius Neuhaus, mit eingehefteter Fürsorgeakte); StaH 351-11 (AfW), 44674 (Ingrid Kovary geb. Neuhaus); StaH 351-11 (AfW), 46277 (Annelore Gimple geb. Neuhaus); StaH 351-11 (AfW), 47339 (Antony Norton, ehem. Hans Adolf Neuhaus); StaH 352-5 (Gesundheitsbehörde – Todesbescheinigungen), 1919, Standesamt 3, Nr. 302 (Adolf Neuhaus, ausgestellt von Dr. Samuel van Biema); StaH 352-5 (Gesundheitsbehörde – Todesbescheinigungen), 1919, Standesamt 3, Nr. 543 (Julius Trier); StaH 352-5 (Gesundheitsbehörde – Todesbescheinigungen), 1919, Standesamt 3, Nr. 589 (Lina Neuhaus); StaH 522-1 (Jüdische Gemeinden), 992b (Kultussteuerkartei der Deutsch-Israelitischen Gemeinde Hamburg), Adolf Neuhaus, Julius Neuhaus; Stadtarchiv Mainz, Familienregister (Nr. 17945, Friedrich Meyer); Stadtarchiv Aschaffenburg, SSAA RegH Heimatregister Bd. Israel Seite 71 (Leopold Trier 1819–1886 und Karolina Trier geb. Bach, gest. 1907); Landesamt für Bürger- u. Ordnungsangelegenheiten LABO Berlin, Akte 50628 (Dr. Ernst Eisner); Yad Vashem, Page of Testimony (Julius Neuhaus); Jüdischer Friedhof Hamburg-Ohlsdorf, Gräberverzeichnis (Adolf Neuhaus C9-247, Lina Neuhaus C9-246, Julius Trier C9-248); Handelskammer Hamburg, Handelsregisterinformationen (Max Eulenburg HR A 4183, Adolf Neuhaus HR A 1101); Hamburger Börsenfirmen, Hamburg 1910, S. 171 (Max Eulenburg); Hamburger Börsenfirmen, Hamburg 1926, S. 264 (Max Eulenburg Nachf.), S. 693 (Arnold Otto Meyer), S. 745 (Adolf Neuhaus); Hamburger Börsenfirmen, Hamburg 1935, S. 215 (Max Eulenburg Nachf.), S. 609 (Adolf Neuhaus); Hamburger Adressbuch (Adolf Neuhaus) 1878–1880, 1882–1888, 1890, 1897, 1899–1901, 1904, 1910; Hamburger Adressbuch (Julius Meyer) 1912; Hamburger Adressbuch (Paula Meyer) 1914, 1918, 1920, 1927, 1932; Hamburger Adressbuch (Julius Neuhaus) 1920–1922, 1924, 1928, 1930–1932, 1934–1936; Berliner Adressbuch (Dr. Ernst Eisner, W 80, Landshuter Str. 28) 1932; Frank Bajohr, "Arisierung" in Hamburg, Die Verdrängung der jüdischen Unternehmer 1933–1945, Hamburg 1998, S. 354 (Firma Max Eulenburg); Ina Lorenz, Die Juden in Hamburg zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik, Hamburg 1987, Seite CXXXII (Sportgruppe Schild); Astrid Louven/Ursula Pietsch, Stolpersteine in Hamburg-Wandsbek, Biografische Spurensuche, Hamburg 2008, S. 152–155 (Robert Salomon Liebermann); Heiko Morisse, Jüdische Rechtsanwälte in Hamburg, Ausgrenzung und Verfolgung im NS-Staat, Hamburg 2003, S. 155 (Dr. Morris Samson); Wilhelm Mosel, Wegweiser zu ehemaligen jüdischen Stätten in Hamburg, Heft 3, Hamburg 1989, S. 23–25 (Heimhuderstr. 68 u. 70, Haushaltungsschule, gertrud Pardo, Margot Massé); Reichsbund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten, Gedenkbuch, Hamburg 1932, S. 373 (Julius Meyer); www.tracingthepast.org (Volkszählung Mai 1939), Paula Meyer, Julius Neuhaus; www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de (Emil u. Alice Hammerschlag, Siegmund Schenk).