Albert Rosenfelder

Albert Rosenfelder (born January 19, 1892 in Fürth , Middle Franconia ; † probably 1933 or 1934 in Dachau concentration camp ) was a German lawyer.

Live and act

Youth and Weimar Republic

Rosenfelder came from a Jewish family from Middle Franconia. After attending school, Rosenfelder studied law . He completed his studies in 1913 with a doctorate as Dr. jur. at the University of Erlangen . In his dissertation he examined "The material objection to the foreign judgment". Rosenfelder then settled as a lawyer in Nuremberg , where he and his colleague Max Süssheim (1875–1933), the Bavarian member of the state parliament for Nuremberg, opened a law firm. Rosenfelder lived privately at Jakobsplatz 14.

In his home country and beyond, Rosenfelder was highly regarded because of his high level of education and speaker talent, but above all because of his habit of representing poor people who needed legal assistance free of charge. A fellow prisoner from his time in the concentration camp later presented the following sketch about himself:

“An inconspicuous, slim person with extraordinary intelligence and astonishing quick-wittedness, for whose sake I would like to stay with him for a short time. He was known far and wide, beyond the borders of the Franconian region , for his great knowledge and the explosive power of his criminal defenses, feared in court and greatly admired by the masses of the people; he left no accused when he came to him in desperation without his help, even if he could not expect a penny for it; I once talked to him about this, and he said to me: 'I don't let a poor person down just because he has no money!' These noble traits were possessed by Dr. Rosenfelder, who was otherwise a strange bachelorette. "

Politically, Rosenfelder was close to the social democracy , from which many of his clients came. Before 1933 he was especially involved in several trials against the Nuremberg NSDAP politician and editor of the anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer Julius Streicher , which is why he was particularly hated by the National Socialists.

Time of National Socialism and murder

A few weeks after the National Socialist “ seizure of power ” in the spring of 1933, Rosenfelder was taken into protective custody on March 17, 1933 together with other local Nazi opponents . In the following years he was held in a Nuremberg prison for a few weeks.

On April 13th, Rosenfelder was transported on the second Nuremberg prisoner transport to the Dachau concentration camp, which had recently opened, where he was housed in the so-called “Jewish barracks”. According to several testimonials, Rosenfelder was subjected to severe abuse in Dachau: Julius Zerfass reports, for example, that he and other inmates, like a draft animal, were clamped in a yoke to keep a heavy roller moving. In an anonymously published brochure from 1934 it was also stated that Rosenfelder had received the “most terrible treatment imaginable”, so that he could “no longer walk upright”.

On the occasion of the May 1, 1933 celebration, Rosenfelder had to give a Labor Day speech in front of the assembled camp inmates and the SS guards on instructions from the camp management . His fellow inmate Hugo Burkhard reports that Rosenfelder used the speech to subtly caricature the camp system and those responsible and that a few months later he told him, Burkhard, about his speech:

"If they had understood the ambiguity of my speech at the time, they would have killed me on the spot."

At the same point Burkhard added that the mockery of the “ Third Reich ” and the Dachau concentration camp, which Rosenfelder had built into his speech, was so skilful that it was remembered by the prisoners for a long time.

In the summer of 1933 Rosenfelder was locked in the arrest wing known as the bunker in Dachau after he and the prisoners Johann Altmann , Delvin Katz and Wilhelm Franz were caught trying to get cashiers with records of the events in the camp and especially of the mistreatment of prisoners that they had sewn into a hat to smuggle out of the warehouse. When the commandant of Dachau, Theodor Eicke , had two thousand five hundred prisoners line up on October 22, 1933 to give a speech in front of them in which he spoke about the "villains" who were spreading "horror news" about his camp abroad, he also explicitly mentioned Altmann, Katz, Franz and Rosenfelder and their "attempt at sabotage". He stated that the four evildoers had been arrested and stated:

“Two of the traitors arrested have already been promoted to the beyond. The Jew Doctor Katz and his helper Willi Franz. We still have enough German oaks to hang anyone who opposes us. There are no atrocities and there is no Cheka cellar in Dachau. Anyone who is beaten is right to receive it. "

On June 29, 1933, the National Socialist press reported that Rosenfelder had perished in Dachau. The same date of death can be found in the so-called Brown Book published by exile communist circles around Willi Munzenberg , which as a source is, however, considered to be unreliable.

It is unclear whether Rosenfelder actually died in June 1933. This is countered by the above-mentioned Burkhard report, which states that he still spoke to Rosenfelder a few months after May 1, 1933, as well as a wanted report from the Reich Criminal Police Gazette of April 12, 1934, according to which Rosenfelder had been released from concentration camp custody shortly before and has since disappeared:

“The Jewish lawyer Dr. Albert Rosenfelder, 19.1.92 in Fürth, was released from protective custody on 27.3.34 and has been on the run since then. He did not fulfill the obligations imposed. He was a member of the Red Aid and a sub-course teacher at the Marxist Workers' School in Nuremberg. There is a strong suspicion that he fled abroad to spread atrocious news there. "

However, Julius Zerfass assumes in his documentation Dachau a Chronicle that Rosenfelder had already been murdered by the SS at the time this report was published and that the report in the criminal police gazette about his release and his suspected escape abroad was probably just a deception by the SS were to cover up Rosenfelder's death.

Wolfgang Benz restricts himself to stating that Rosenfelder disappeared from the bunker in 1934 without a trace.

Fonts

• The material objections to the foreign judgment , 1913. (Dissertation)

literature

• Michael Diefenbacher: Memorial book for the Nuremberg victims of the 1998 Shoah .
• Julius Zerfass: Dachau. A chronicle , 1936.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Barbara Fleming: The Diary of Karl Süssheim (1878-1947). Orientalist between Munich and Istanbul , 1982, p. 5.
2. ↑ Hugo Burkhard: Dance times a Jew. my experiences in the concentration camps Dachau, Buchenwald, Getto Shanghai 1933-1948 , p. 47.
3. ↑ concentration camp. An appeal to the world's conscience. A Book of Abominations Accusing Victims , p. 81.
4. ↑ Hugo Burkhard, p. 49.
5. ↑ Die Weltbühne , Vol. 30, Issues 27–52, p. 1347.
6. ↑ Horst Göppinger : Jurists of Jewish descent in the "Third Reich": Disenfranchisement and persecution, 1991, p. 63.
7. ↑ Brown Book on Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror , 1973, p. 321.
8. ^ Reichskriminalpolizeiblatt of April 12, 1934.
9. ^ Julius Zerfass: Dachau. Eine Chronik , 1936, p. 213.
10. ↑ Wolfgang Benz: Terror without a system , p. 24.