Fritz Schönfeld

Friedrich Schönfeld , known as Fritz (born August 5, 1895 in Berlin ; † around October 31, 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp ) was a German theater actor and director .

Life

Schönfeld began his stage career after his military service at the end of the First World War , in the 1918/19 season, at the Deutsches Theater in Libau in the Baltic Sea town of Libau ( Liepāja in today's Latvia ), which was still under German occupation at that time . As early as 1919 he returned home to Germany to fulfill a three-season commitment to the Stadttheater von Minden . In the following years Schönfeld played on stages in Stettin ('Bellevue-Theater'), Bremerhaven ( Stadttheater ), Saarbrücken (at the 'Stadttheater', where he was also allowed to direct for the first time) and from 1928 in Berlin ('Lustspielhaus', Deutsches Volkstheater ).

From the seizure of power by the National Socialists Schoenfeld was during his tenure as director and actor at the Potsdamer Schauspielhaus surprised and released in the same year (1933). Of all things , the NSDAP- Kampfblatt Völkischer Beobachter praised Schönfeld in his capacity as a director at the Potsdamer Schauspielhaus in the culture section of its first edition in the Third Reich on January 31, 1933. Critic Cobü. commented on, as he called it, "harmlessly cheerful intrigue game 'Die Schlange'" as follows: "The game management (Fritz Schönfeld) knew how to hit the light comedy tone that exhilarated the whole thing and to hold it through to the end". It was to be the last benevolent criticism for the Jewish artist.

Schönfeld eventually joined the Jewish Cultural Association until he was arrested. He was on 17 March 1943 by Berlin to the Theresienstadt ghetto on and on 29 September 1944 in the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau deported . There he was late October 1944 almost simultaneously as his colleagues Kurt Gerron and Otto Wallburg , gassed .

literature

• Kay Less : Between the stage and the barracks. Lexicon of persecuted theater, film and music artists from 1933 to 1945 . With a foreword by Paul Spiegel . Metropol, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-938690-10-9 , p. 307.

Web links

• Entry in the Central Database of the Names of Holocaust Victims at the Yad Vashem Memorial