Adolf Böhm (Zionist)

Adolf Böhm (born January 20, 1873 in Teplitz-Schönau, Austria-Hungary , † April 10, 1941 in Hartheim, Alkoven (Upper Austria) ) was an Austrian factory owner and historiographer of the Zionist movement .

Life

Before 1938

Böhm was a wealthy businessman and factory owner, co-owner and later owner of the Moritz Böhm & Sohn cotton wool factory in Vienna , and chairman of the Jewish National Fund there and member of the board of the Jewish Community in Vienna . He was highly respected in the Jewish community of Vienna, which comprised almost 200,000 people, and had made a name for himself in particular as the author of a two-volume history of the Zionist movement, the third volume of which could no longer appear. When Martin Buber published the monthly Zionist cultural magazine Der Jude from 1916 to 1924 , Adolf Böhm was one of her collaborators. Together with Leo Goldhammer he gave the magazine Palestine. Magazine for the construction of Palestine in Fiba-Verlag, Vienna, and from 1927 he was also its editor.

Böhm refused repeated invitations to emigrate to Palestine because he did not want to acknowledge the existential threat posed by National Socialism . On one of his last trips to Palestine, probably in 1934, he took with him extensive parts of Stefan Zweig's library , which are now housed in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem .

After the "Anschluss" of Austria

Almost immediately after the so-called annexation of Austria to the German Reich , the SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann began to persuade Böhm to compile a list of the most influential and wealthy Jews by making personal visits to the factory every working day for six weeks. Towards the end of the month, Eichmann had six leading representatives of the Jewish community who were still at liberty summoned - the President and Vice-President of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien , Desider Friedmann and Robert Stricker , and Jakob Ehrlich, formerly Vice President of the Religious Community and President of the “Zionist Organization” , had already been arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp - to demand unconditional obedience and uncompromising cooperation in accordance with his instructions. He insisted that one of the six should be named as the person responsible in this regard and suggested Adolf Böhm. Because of Böhm's advanced age and his health was already bad, the six nominated the youngest among them, Alois Rothenberg from the Palestine Office in Vienna, instead . Shortly afterwards Joseph Löwenherz was released from prison and appointed full-time director of Vienna's Jewish community by Eichmann and thus de facto Eichmann's vicarious agent.

Böhm, who continued to endure Eichmann's “visits”, finally suffered a nervous breakdown from which he did not quite recover. He was subsequently housed, initially presumably in the Inzersdorf sanatorium and from September 20, 1940 to March 7, 1941 in the “Berta Presser Recreational Home” in Kaltenleuthaben . From there he was transferred to the sanatorium “Am Steinhof” in Vienna , possibly with a stopover in Maria Gugging . From there, on March 13, 1941, he and 20 other patients were taken to the Hartheim killing center and murdered there. He was officially transferred on March 13, 1941 to an "institution for the Jewish mentally ill" in the General Government of Poland and died on April 10, 1941 in Chełm ; This was a common camouflage for Jewish victims of the euthanasia murders of “ Aktion T4 ”: the death certificates were allegedly issued by the “registry office Cholm, Post Lublin”, but in reality were issued by the T4 headquarters in Berlin, brought to Lublin and posted there. His life insurance had already been seized by the Vienna Tax Office on December 21, 1940 for the Reich flight tax .

family

Böhm's wife Olga, b. Lemberger, was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942 and murdered in Auschwitz in 1944 . The two children Elisabeth and Ernst managed to escape to North America and Australia in time.

Family property

The Moritz Böhm & Sohn cotton wool factory was Aryanized in March 1939 . After the war, it was returned to Adolf Böhm's son, Ernest Bowen (formerly Ernst Böhm) within the framework of the Third Restitution Act of February 1947, with the usual conditions and high payments for investments allegedly made.

Works

• The Jewish National Fund: an instrument to remedy the plight of the Jews. Jewish publishing house, Berlin, 1910
• The Jewish National Fund. (Keren Kajemeth Le'Israel. National Fund Library, No. 2). Jerusalem, 1922 (further editions until 1935)
• The Zionist Movement: A Brief Presentation of Its Development. Part I: The Movement until Theodor Herzl's death. Welt-Verlag, Berlin, 1920
• The Zionist Movement. Volume 1: The Zionist Movement until the End of the World War. (1921, new edition Jüdischer Verlag, Berlin, 1935); Volume 2: The Zionist Movement 1918 to 1925 (Jüdischer Verlag, Berlin, 1937).

Remarks

1. ↑ Friedman and Stricker were later released, asked to September 1942 in Vienna under house arrest, then to the Theresienstadt concentration camp deported and 1944 in Auschwitz murdered. Ehrlich died in Dachau in May 1938 as a result of his severe abuse.
2. ↑ http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-016-06.html
3. ↑ Erika Weinzierl & Otto Dov Kulka (eds.): Expulsion and new beginnings: Israeli citizens of Austrian origin. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar, 1992, ISBN 3-205-05561-6 , pp. 201-203
4. ↑ Eberhard Gabriel & Wolfgang Neugebauer (eds.): From forced sterilization to murder. (On the history of Nazi euthanasia in Vienna, Part II). Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar, 2002, ISBN 3-205-99325-X , p. 101

Web links

• Literature by and about Adolf Böhm in the catalog of the German National Library
• http://lebensspuren.schloss-hartheim.at/index.php/2-biografie/8-adolf-boehm