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Kurt Becher * 1909

Steintorweg 11 Hotel 'Steintor' (Hamburg-Mitte, St. Georg)

aus NL nach Sobibor

Kurt August Becher, born on 24 May 1909 in Hamburg, deported from the Netherlands to Sobibor

last residential address in Hamburg: Steintorweg 11 (Hotel Steintor)

Kurt Becher was a son of the authorized signatory Martin Becher (1877–1935) and his wife Gertrude, née Thilo (born in Berlin in 1884). He had a younger brother named Heinz, who was born in Hamburg as well in 1919. The family lived on Beim Andreasbrunnen in Eppendorf in the 1930s. Kurt began, as his father had done before him, a commercial apprenticeship and subsequently became a salaried employee and authorized signatory of F. J. Ambor, a small metal goods (irrigation fittings) company on Spaldingstraße. He married the daughter (Cäcilie Ambor, born in 1914) of the owner, who died in 1935 and whose son, Hans, succeeded him. Until 1938, he lived with his wife at Harvestehuderweg 81. Sometime before the "Aryanization” of the company in the aftermath of the November Pogrom of 1938, the spouses must have separated.

Afterward, Kurt Becher apparently lived at Hotel Steintor on Steintorweg for some time, before emigrating to the Netherlands in Nov. 1938. Soon thereafter, his first marriage was divorced. From that point onward until at least Feb. 1941, he lived in Amsterdam, where he got married to Lili Baar, born in Vienna in 1909. One can assume that both were interned following the German occupation until they were deported on 20 Mar. 1943 to the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland, where all traces of them disappear.

With the exception of the father, Martin Becher, who died in Hamburg in 1935, the other members of the Becher family were also deported eastward and fell victim to the Nazi terror. Kurt’s mother Gertrude was deported to Riga on 6 December 1941, while his brother Heinz, who had moved to Westphalia in 1941 and later to the Rhineland, trying in vain to emigrate to Palestine, was deported on 2 Mar. 1943 from Bielefeld to Auschwitz and murdered there on 1 June 1943. On the transport on 8 Nov. 1941, Kurt Becher’s first wife Cäcilie, who had meanwhile married the butcher Ernst Müller and given birth to their son Denny, eight months old at the time of the deportation, was also sent, together with her family, to Minsk to their certain deaths.

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

© Benedikt Behrens

Quellen: 1; 4; 5; 8; StaH, 522-1, Jüdische Gemeinden, 992 e 2 (Deportationslisten); Digitaal Monument Joodse Gemeenschap in Nederland, http://www.joodsmonument.nl.

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