Elisabeth Kohn

Elisabeth Kohn (born February 11, 1902 in Munich - murdered November 25, 1941 near Kaunas (Fort IX) ) was a German lawyer from a Jewish family. In addition to her job, she was socially committed in a variety of ways, for example for the SPD , the pacifist German League for Human Rights , the General German Trade Union Federation and the SPD newspaper Münchener Post . In November 1941, she was with her mother and her sister Luise due to the racist Nazi persecution of Jews in the Shoah deported and five days later in what was then German-occupied Lithuania murdered.

Life

Elisabeth Kohn was a granddaughter of Salomon Kohn, born on April 19, 1830 in Wassertrüdingen , who settled in Munich in 1859 as a master tanner and leather dealer and died in 1880. Her father, the businessman Heinrich Kohn, born in Munich in 1866, had attended the Maximiliansgymnasium in Munich from 1875 to 1880 and later ran a wholesale business with grain and animal feed. After his death in 1933, his wife Olga, née Schulhöfer (* 1878 in Würzburg), took over the company, but had to deregister it in 1938 at the instigation of the National Socialist administration. Elisabeth grew up with her siblings Mathilde (* 1861; married Pfeiffer) and Emanuel in Munich and attended a humanistic grammar school here. She then became one of the few women to study law , philosophy, psychology and education at the University of Munich . On July 24, 1924, she received her doctorate on Meinong's theory of values ​​in its development to a doctorate in law and in 1925 passed the first state examination in law for the higher judicial and administrative service. She completed her legal clerkship in the office of Hans Fröhlich, among others. After passing the second state examination in law, on November 7, 1928, she was admitted to the bar at the regional courts of Munich I and II and at the Munich Higher Regional Court .

Kohn joined the law firm of Max Hirschberg , Philipp Loewenfeld and Ludwig Regensteiner, who had made a name for themselves in the Weimar Republic through a series of political criminal trials. In the five years that Kohn worked for the firm, she represented the interests of Jewish citizens and the SPD in southern Bavaria . She also defended the Red Aid of Germany , of which she was co-founder at the end of 1924.

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists, Kohn was banned from working on August 5, 1933. The Ministry of Justice rejected her request for repeal on the grounds, among other things, that "she was young and single and could find employment in any female profession." In the following years, Kohn worked in the welfare department of the Welfare Office of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde in Munich .

Out of consideration for her mother, Kohn and her sister, the painter Maria Luiko , refrained from emigrating from Germany, but helped, under the umbrella of the local Zionist group, to prepare other Jews for their emigration to Palestine. From November 1940 she worked as an auxiliary consul at Julius Baer , where she advised Jewish refugees and emigrants.

From 1939, her family was increasingly exposed to harassment by the authorities. They had to leave their apartment in 1939 and move four times at ever shorter intervals over the next two years. In November 1941, Kohn was quartered in a boarding house and finally deported to the Riga ghetto on November 20, 1941 together with her mother and sister . Five days later, they were murdered together with 997 other Munich women and men persecuted as Jews near Kovno (German: Kaunas), Lithuania .

memory

At the suggestion of the Munich action artist Wolfram P. Kastner , a memorial was placed in the building of the Law Faculty of the Ludwig Maximilians University at the entrance to the library's reading room in July 2003 to keep the memory of 205 Jewish lawyers alive or studying in Munich , campaigned for the rights of others and were disenfranchised, expelled or murdered during the time of National Socialism. It shows a large-format portrait of Elisabeth Kohn and next to it in a showcase a text panel with the names of the lawyers.

Her name is also recorded on the memorial plaque of the lawyers on the Nazi professional bans in the Munich Palace of Justice .

By resolution of December 9, 2004, a street was named after her in the new building area on Ackermannstrasse in Munich's Schwabing-West district and the “School on Elisabeth-Kohn-Strasse” was set up accordingly.

In Kovno there has been an official inscription by the city of Munich since November 2000:

In sadness and shame - and appalled at that

Silence of those who know - remember

the state capital Munich of 1000 Jewish people

Men and women on November 20, 1941

deported from Munich to Kowno and

five days later in this place

were brutally murdered.

literature

• Hans Kohn: The Kohn family from Wassertruedingen. Manuscript. Dresden 1932 (Leo Baeck Institute Center for Jewish History, New York: online).
• Heinrich Kohn and family: Communications from the Münchner Anwaltsverein eV, August / September 2002, in: http://www.muenchener.anwaltverein.de/jahrgang_2002/Mitteilungen .
• Biographical memorial book of Munich Jews 1933–1945 , Vol. 1, Munich 2003 (passport photo).
• Kohn, Elisabeth. In: Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945. Ed. from the Leo Baeck Institute , Jerusalem. Saur, Munich 1988. ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 201.

Web links

• Memory of Elisabeth Kohn . (at judentum.net)
• Thilo Scholle: Another tradition. Reminder of critical lawyers. (at forum-recht-online.de, 2003)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Annual report on the K. Maximilians-Gymnasium in Munich for the school year 1875/76 to 1879/80