Friedrich Epstein

Friedrich Epstein (born January 27, 1882 in Breslau ; † December 22, 1943 in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp , also Fritz Epstein ) was a German chemist and "Scientific Member" of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society . Epstein headed a department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin. Because of his Jewish origins, he was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp .

Life

Epstein came from a wealthy family in Breslau. His parents were the factory owner Joseph Epstein and his wife Marie Friedenthal. From 1927 Friedrich Epstein lived with his sister-in-law Elsbeth Luise Epstein and their daughter Annemarie at Grunewaldallee 20 (now Argentinische Allee 20) in Berlin-Zehlendorf . Friedrich Epstein's brother, the architect Walther Epstein , designed the house for the family in 1908.

education

In 1899 Friedrich Epstein attended the Johannesgymnasium in Breslau and passed his Abitur at the Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Berlin. He then studied chemistry at the universities of Munich , Lausanne , Berlin and Heidelberg . With a dissertation The rate of chemical self-heating. Epstein received his doctorate in adiabatic reaction kinetics in October 1905 in Heidelberg .

Professional background

After completing his doctorate, he did his military service as a one-year volunteer , and then in 1907 he became an assistant to Fritz Haber at the Technical University of Karlsruhe . When Fritz Haber moved to Berlin in 1911 as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for physical chemistry and electrochemistry , Epstein followed him. In 1914 he went briefly to Reginald Oliver Herzog at the German Technical University in Prague , a position which he soon left to take part in the First World War as a soldier . In September 1914 he was seriously wounded and discharged from the army. From 1915 he worked again at Haber's Institute in Berlin, where he was Haber's “right hand” for three years in his work on chemical warfare . Haber and Epstein were also very close personally. Epstein remained until 1933 as a department head at the KWI for physical chemistry and electrochemistry.

emigration

After the enactment of the so-called “ Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service ” in 1933, Epstein, who had converted to the Protestant Church, did not immediately lose his position due to the combatant privilege despite his origins, but left the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute “voluntarily”. In 1934 he emigrated to France, where he tried to find work opportunities for other emigrated scientists. However, he turned down offers of help for himself.

Until 1940 he lived in a small hotel in Paris. There he met Else Weil again with the Levy family , whom he had already known and admired from Berlin. In September 1939 Friedrich Epstein and Else Weil, Kurt Tucholsky's first wife , were interned for the first time as stateless persons by the French government, but released again after a short time. After the German invasion in May 1940, both fled to unoccupied territory .

Friedrich Epstein was taken in in the south of France, in Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer , by his niece Annemarie Meier-Graefe, wife of Julius Meier-Graefe . At the end of May 1940 he was interned for the second time in the Les Milles camp . When Annemarie Meier-Graefe emigrated to the USA in the spring of 1941 , she left their house La Banette in Saint-Cyr-Sur-Mer to Friedrich Epstein and Else Weil. A few months later both lived in Salernes between Aix-en-Provence and Cannes. There they were under police supervision (résidence forcée). According to letters, they planned to marry and flee to the United States together. The niece Annemarie Meier-Graefe later wrote: his encounter with Pimbusch (nickname Else Weils) was one of the most beautiful periods in his life - shortly before he died. As Else Because in August 1942 in the detention Les Milles deported was tried Epstein and the family Levy desperately to save, but to no avail.

Until the end of May 1943, Epstein lived in the Hotel Allégre in Salernes, then again in a hotel in Paris. On December 17, 1943, Epstein was transported to Transport No. 63 deported from the Drancy assembly camp to Auschwitz and presumably murdered there. December 22, 1943 was set by the city of Salernes - by death certificate from 1948 - as the date of his death.

reception

“Then there was a well-known chemist, a German university professor, who had done great service to the army command in the first war with his inventions. He was a man of about sixty, short, stiff, slim, he usually wore an unspeakably dirty tennis suit and a monocle. He had the demeanor and expression of a German officer from the imperial era, brief, clipped, polite manners, strange vocabulary, sentences and expressions abbreviated like telegrams. He always walked around with a slight haze of alcohol, and whenever he met one he would offer you a schnapps or some other drink, clink glasses with you, keep your arm sharp, look you in the eye and count on it one reciprocates. Sometimes the cafard [depression] would grab him, then he would probably say: "Don't come close to me today, I have a cafard" "

- Lion Feuchtwanger : The devil in France. Diary 1940. Letters.

literature

• Reinhard Rürup (with the assistance of Michael Schüring): Fates and Careers: Commemorative Book for Researchers Expelled from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society by the National Socialists , Volume 14 of: History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in National Socialism, Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Promotion of Science, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 9783892447979 , 539 S., pp. 185–187 - a short biography about Epstein.
• Peter Böthig u. Alexandra Brach: Else Weil - fragments of a German-Jewish life. Catalog for the exhibition of the Kurt Tucholsky Literature Museum Rheinsberg. 2010.
• Jacques Grandjonc: Zone of Uncertainty. Exile and internment in the south of France 1933-1944 . Reinbek 1993.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Another dating from Reinhard Rürup , Gedenkbuch ..., ISBN 9783892447979 , p. 187. According to this, the Vichy regime delivered both people to the Germans in September 1942, "who deported them to Auschwitz", this is undated.
2. ^ Based on Yad Vashem, with reference to Le Memorial de la deportation des juifs de france , Beate et Serge Klarsfeld , Paris 1978.
3. ^ Lion Feuchtwanger: The devil in France. Diary 1940. Letters. Berlin 1992, pp. 239, 401.

Web links

Commons : Friedrich Epstein  - Collection of images, videos and audio files