Antoinette Flegenheim

Antoinette Flegenheim

Antoinette Flegenheim (born May 11, 1863 in Himmelpfort , today Fürstenberg / Havel ; † April 8, 1943 in Frankfurt am Main ) was one of the 705 survivors of one of the most famous shipping disasters of modern times, in which the largest passenger ship in the world at the time , the RMS Titanic , sank in the North Atlantic on the morning of April 15, 1912 and around 1,500 people were killed.

Life

Antoinette Flegenheim was born in 1863 as Berta Antonia Maria Wendt in the municipality of Himmelpfort in the then Templin district as the daughter of the forest ranger and later Royal Prussian forester Wilhelm Karl Ferdinand Wendt and his wife Pauline Anna Dorothee Wagner. In Berlin she met her future husband Alfred Flegenheimer (born October 28, 1869). He came from a wealthy Frankfurt family and had arrived in New York on August 4, 1890 with the Servia . His brother was the film producer Hermann Fellner (born Flegenheimer). A sister of Antonia Wendt, Juliane Johanna (called Hanny), had married the actor and director Hermann Dieckhof-Haack .

On the passenger list as Toni Wendt , Antoinette traveled with the Suevia to New York on October 20, 1890 and married Alfred Flegenheimer on November 1, 1890 in Manhattan . As a profession, he gave the publisher. The husband died on November 23, 1907; his body was brought to Frankfurt am Main and buried in the Jewish cemetery . Antoinette Flegenheim, as she now called herself, had become a wealthy widow through the death of her husband and traveled frequently between the United States and Europe . She had a large apartment at Windscheidstrasse 41 in Charlottenburg , at that time still an independent city near Berlin, and lived in New York at the Hotel The Dorilton , 110 Wooster, Manhattan, among other places .

In Cherbourg , she went on board the Titanic as a passenger and paid 31 British pounds , 13  s and 8  d for her 1st class cabin (D 8)  . At the time, that was equivalent to a British woman's three-year wage for a 50-hour week. On the night of the collision, she went on deck and was directed to lifeboat No. 7, which was the first to be launched with 28 passengers. There was another German passenger in the boat, Alfred Nourney, who had taken on the name Baron Drackstaedt as an impostor. On April 18, 1912, she arrived in New York with the other people who had been rescued.

Another Titanic lifeboat , April 15, 1912

In Berlin Lokalanzeiger then her picture, which was given by her sister Hanny Dieckhof-Haack to the newspaper appeared. In the same year Antoinette married the British Paul Elliot White-Hurst (also Whitehurst) in Buffalo . With this she was still registered in the Charlottenburg apartment, but also in Harriseahead, Staffordshire , England. The German apartment was then given up at the beginning of the war. Her husband was a lieutenant in the British secret service during World War I. His German wife is noted as a deficiency in his military file - he then separated from her and she lived in The Hague during the war .

In the interwar period she lived under her English name in Munich , Nibelungenstrasse 90 (today Arnulfstrasse 300) and then from 1938 onwards on Menzinger Strasse and from 1939 on Kaulbachstrasse . Now a British citizen, she left the city without deregistering after the United Kingdom declared war on the German Empire . She died in Frankfurt in 1943.

Web links

• Antoinette Flegenheim - First Class Passenger on the Titanic , Encyclopedia Titanica (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Only known portrait of Titanic Survivor Antoinette Flegenheim , Encyclopedia Titanica