Fritz Kahl (physician)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fritz and Margarethe Kahl with sons (1947)

Fritz Kahl (born December 7, 1895 in Sterbfritz , district of Schlüchtern , † 1974 in Weilburg ) was a German doctor from Frankfurt am Main . With his wife Margarete Kahl (born November 15, 1896 in Schlüchtern , † 1958 in Frankfurt am Main) he saved Jews from deportation to the extermination camps and helped many persecuted during the Nazi era . The couple Fritz and Margarete Kahl were honored in 2006 by the Yad Vashem memorial as “ Righteous Among the Nations ”.

Career

Fritz Kahl was born as the son of the Protestant pastor and later church councilor Heinrich Kahl (1863-1937) and his wife Else. The family moved to Frankfurt am Main in 1905 when the father became parish priest at the Jakobskirche and then at the Markuskirche , which was newly built in 1912 . Fritz Kahl grew up in a parental home that was characterized by a liberal spirit. His father was also the chairman of the sponsoring association of a local hospital, from which the Markus Hospital developed in the 1920s in collaboration with the surgeon Otto Loewe .

After graduating from high school in 1914, Fritz Kahl volunteered at the Lessing Gymnasium in Frankfurt and was most recently a lieutenant in the reserve and company commander. He then studied medicine in Frankfurt am Main and Marburg. There he turned to right-wing student circles, indignant about the Versailles Treaty , which he regarded as unjust . In 1923 he joined the Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten . After his time as an assistant doctor at the Hospital zum Heiligen Geist and doctorate, he married Margarete Zimmermann, who was one year younger than him, in 1924 and settled in as a general practitioner in his parents' parsonage on Falkstraße, from 1928 at Franz-Rücker-Allee 10, from 1933 in Ginnheimer Strasse 7 and finally from 1938 in the house at Blanchardstrasse 22 in Frankfurt-Bockenheim . Due to the proximity to the university, many students - including Jewish - lived in the rectory for a while.

The father of Margarete Kahl (née Zimmermann) was the district judge Hermann Zimmermann (1856–1902) from Schlüchtern, who died early and was also a free conservative member of the Prussian state parliament in Berlin. Her stepfather Georg Winneberger also worked as a magistrate in Zabern and Altkirch in Alsace until the beginning of the war in 1914. Margarete Kahl studied medicine in Heidelberg in the early 1920s. Her college friend was Elsa Liefmann, who later became the wife of Adolf Freudenberg , who had worked for the refugee aid organization of the World Council of Churches in Geneva since the late 1930s and coordinated the rescues of Jews from there.

Act

The Kahls rejected National Socialism very early on . In 1933/1934 Kahl flew to Berlin and stood up for a Jewish colleague whose practice was to be closed. On November 9, 1938, he saved the factory owner Albert Leon by taking him past the Gestapo to a Jewish hospital. Despite the ban, he treated Jewish patients until the spring of 1945.

Margarete Kahl provided the persecuted in her area with food. In 1942 the Jew Robert Eisenstädt, who had fled the Majdanek concentration camp , came to their house. The Kahls, together with the parish administrator of the Trinity parish, Heinz Welke , organized an escape to Switzerland . After a long period of preparation, Eisenstädt fled there with his pregnant fiancée Eva Müller with forged passports on February 21, 1943, until Singen accompanied by Margarethe Kahl. Eisenstätt provided information about the extermination of the Jews in Switzerland and reported in a 1944 publication on his deportation to Majdanek. A short time later, another Jew, Tuschi Müller, came to the Kahls' house. Margarete Kahl prepared her in the air raid shelter of her house for an escape in the direction of Austria / Hungary. Müller survived in Vienna .

Jewish partners from a so-called mixed marriage living in Frankfurt am Main were persecuted towards the end of the war and received help. The “Bockenheimer Network”, a group of helpers around the couple Kahl and Pastor Welke, warned of “actions” by the Gestapo, procured food and protected the persecuted in a variety of ways. After the occupation of Frankfurt by the American troops in April 1945, Kahl was appointed as one of the few unencumbered doctors by the city commandant as "City Health Director", an activity that he only carried out briefly in order to return to his own practice.

The couple Fritz and Margarete Kahl were posthumously honored in 2006 by the Yad Vashem memorial as “Righteous Among the Nations”. In 2008, a position in the Bockenheim district of Frankfurt was named in honor of the couple as "Margarete-und-Fritz-Kahl-Anlage". However, since this does not have any associated house numbers, it is often not recorded in the maps.

Margarete and Fritz Kahl had four children, three sons and a daughter. Her oldest son, the Berlin internist Eugen Kahl (* 1927) reports as a witness at events .

literature

  • Petra Bonavita: With a wrong passport and potassium cyanide: Rescuers and rescued from Frankfurt am Main during the Nazi era , Schmetterling Verlag, Stuttgart, 2009 ISBN 978-3-89657-135-9
  • Petra Bonavita: With a wrong passport and potassium cyanide . In: Arno Lustiger : Rescue Resistance - About the Rescuers of Jews in Europe during the Nazi Era , Wallstein, Göttingen, 2011 ISBN 978-3-8353-0990-6
  • What you've done ... Civil courage and resistance , catalog for the exhibition on the occasion of Heinz Welke's centenary in 2011 in Frankfurt am Main, Paul Gerhardt Gemeinde, Frankfurt am Main, 2011
  • Monica Kingreen: pursuit and rescue in Frankfurt am Main and in the Rhine-Main region . In: Beate Kosmala / Claudia Schoppmann: Survival in the Underground , Berlin 2002, p. 181 f.
  • Claudia Michels: Two "unsung heroes" from Bockenheim . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of November 8, 2006
  • Siegfried Sunnus: Righteous Among the Nations . In: Deutsches Pfarrerblatt, issue 9/2006
  • Siegmund Drexler, Siegmund Kalinski, Hans Mausbach: Medical fate under persecution, 1933–1945 in Frankfurt am Main and Offenbach: a memorandum , State Medical Association Hesse (ed.), Verlag für Akademische Schriften, 1990 ISBN 978-3-88864-025- 4 , p. 39

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Anton Bette (Ed.): Biographisches Jahrbuch und Deutscher Nekrolog with a list of the dead 1902 , Volume 7, G. Reimer, 1905, p. 130 (appendix)
  2. ↑ Beate Kosmala: Robert Eisenstadt's escape from the Majdanek concentration camp . In: Wolfgang Benz: Survival in the Third Reich. Jews in the underground and their helpers , Beck, Munich, 2003 ISBN 978-3-406-51029-8 , p. 288 ff. (Available in Google Books)
  3. ↑ Shall I be my brother's keeper? Further documents on the need for Jews and refugees today . Evangelischer Verlag, Zollikon-Zurich, 1944, pp. 32–38
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Benz: Survival in the Third Reich: Jews in the Underground and their Helpers , CH Beck, Munich, 2003, ISBN 978-3-40651029-8 , p. 298 (available from Google Books)
  5. ^ Museum for the blind workshop
personal data
SURNAME Kahl, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor and rescuer of the Jews
DATE OF BIRTH December 7, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Sterbfritz , district of Schlüchtern
DATE OF DEATH 1974
Place of death Frankfurt am Main