Bernhard Karlsberg

Bernhard Karlsberg , pseudonym: Berg , (born October 11, 1899 in Hamburg , † January 18, 1985 in London ) was a German-Dutch lawyer and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Bernhard Karlsberg grew up in a middle-class Jewish family. He attended the Wilhelm Gymnasium in his hometown, which he left in 1917 with a high school diploma. During the First World War he did military service and interpreted for German-Turkish soldiers in Palestine until 1918 . He then studied law and political science at universities in Kiel, Munich, Berlin and Hamburg. He received his doctorate in law from Hamburg University in 1921. He then followed his father's example and, like him, took a position at the Cunard Company. He was politically active in the KPD , lectured for the international workers 'aid and the Marxist workers' school .

After the handover of power to the National Socialists , Karlsberg was active in the resistance . Together with the former Senate President Herbert Ruscheweyh , he defended political prisoners. In January 1935, the public prosecutor's office at the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court decided to search for Karlsberg on a wanted note. The lawyer fled via Switzerland to Prague , followed by his wife Ilse and the children Rahel, Ruth and Walter. In 1937 he was allowed to practice as a lawyer in the Netherlands with a work permit. After the " Anschluss of Austria " to the National Socialist German Reich , his wife and children came to Amsterdam in 1938, where the father of the family lived. Karlsberg's parents and his mother-in-law were also able to travel to the Netherlands.

After the Wehrmacht occupied the Netherlands, Bernhard Karlsberg lived underground from May 1940. Ilse Karlsberg was arrested in September 1940 and was charged in Hamburg on suspicion of high treason . Despite the dismissal of the case, she remained in detention. In September 1942 she was brought to Theresienstadt , in October 1944 transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp and murdered there. Bernhard Karlsberg's parents and mother-in-law died in the Sobibor extermination camp .

Hanna Lender, who lived in Prague as a friend of the family, continuously supported Bernhard Karlsberg and his three children, who survived. Karlsberg married Hanna Lendner in 1948. After the end of the Second World War he worked again as a lawyer in Amsterdam. He was committed to the reparation of property and property stolen in the Netherlands and received the title of Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau in April 1965 . In 1981 he recorded his memories of his school days in Hamburg in the article Light and Shadow . In an obituary written for him, the lawyer, who died in 1985, was referred to as "Dutch by conviction".

Rehabilitation

In 1990, relatives who lived in Amsterdam came to the conclusion by chance that Karlsberg had not only lost his German citizenship in November 1937, but also his doctorate in September 1938. This led to an exchange of letters with Hamburg University for a year and a half. Also due to public pressure, on November 6, 1991, the institution revised the decision it had made more than 50 years earlier.

literature

• Wilfried Weinke: Karlsberg, Bernhard . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 1 . Christians, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-7672-1364-8 , pp. 155-156 .

Web links

• The history of the Karlsberg family on www.sobibor.de