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Emanuel Bruck * 1901

Koppel 26 (Hamburg-Mitte, St. Georg)

HIER WOHNTE
DR. EMANUEL BRUCK
JG. 1901
INHAFTIERT
KZ NEUENGAMME
1942 KZ DACHAU
ERMORDET 29.8.1942

Dr. Emanuel Bruck, born 6 Sep. 1901 in Magdeburg, died 29 Aug. 1942 in Dachau

Last address: Koppel 26

Emanuel Bruck was a statistician and a member of the German Communist Party (KPD). After the handing-over of power to Hitler in 1933, he went into exile in Denmark and worked for the Communist Party leadership there. In 1934 he was sent to Hamburg as a party instructor and courier. His address at that time was Koppel 26 in St. Georg. Soon after he entered the country, he was arrested and convicted of "conspiracy to commit high treason” and sentenced to eight years in prison by the Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court), a special Nazi court that operated outside the bounds of constitutional law and had jurisdiction over a broad array of "political offenses.” After he had served the prison term, he was taken into "protective custody” at the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp in 1942. From there he was deported to the Dachau concentration camp on 1 August 1942, where he died four weeks later.

Bruck’s non-Jewish wife Edith "Sarah” (née Fürst, *17 Jan. 1904) lived in Berlin. A few days after his death she received notification from the commandant at Dachau that her husband had died "in the local hospital of complications resulting from pneumonia.” She was a pediatric nurse and active in the resistance group around the KPD functionary John Sieg. She was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp on 24 November 1944, where she remained until 27 April 1945. This day was the beginning of a six-day death march via Malchin and the Plauer See to Brook (10 km west of Plau am See), where she did not die, as some sources reported, but rather, according to her own statement in 1981, she was liberated by Soviet troops. There is a Stolperstein for Emanuel Bruck near his last residence in St. Georg in 2007.

Translator: Amy Lee
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

© Benedikt Behrens

Quellen: Schriftliche Mitteilung der Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg, 2004; Schriftliche Mitteilung der Gedenkstätte KZ Dachau, 2004; E-Mail der Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück v. 12.1.2009; VAN, Totenliste Hamburger Widerstandskämpfer und Verfolgter 1933-1945, Hamburg 1968; Hochmuth, Ursel, Niemand und nichts wird vergessen, Hamburg 2005, S. 38; Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück (Hg.), Gedenkbuch für die Opfer des Konzentrationslagers Ravensbrück, Berlin 2005.