James Henschel

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James Henschel (born February 5, 1863 in Hamburg , † August 26, 1939 in Holland ), actually Jeremias Henschel, was a German cinema pioneer and businessman from Hamburg.

Personal

James Henschel married Friderike Blumenthal from Lübeck in 1887 and had four daughters and a son with her.

The cinema empire

James Henschel was, depending on the presentation, the first or second operator of a pure cinema in Hamburg. B. was a pub. In December 1905 he opened the Helios Theater in Grosse Bergstrasse 11/15 in Altona . In January 1906, the Belle Alliance Theater followed in shoulder blade 115 with 1,400 seats. Almost every year he opened a new movie theater. In 1917 he took over the Passage Kino .

In 1918 the UFA approached Henschel and convinced him to sell his company and most of his cinemas to them. Henschel managed to get his sons-in-law Hermann Urich-Sass and Hugo Streit to work at UFA. In addition to the purchase price, he participated in the profits of the cinemas for 20 years. Henschel invested the purchase price in land and securities, so he survived the inflation well and was able to help his sons-in-law to found their company.

emigration

The National Socialist persecution of the Jews did not stop at James Henschel either. In order to be able to emigrate to his daughter Bianca Kahn in Holland, he was forced to sell all of his property and to pay taxes and duties for emigrants ( Reich flight tax , Jewish property tax ). As a result, he lost almost all of his fortune. After his death in 1939 the Gestapo initiated his expatriation .

List of James Henschel's cinemas

Cinema name - address - owned since

In 1918 James Henschel sold all the cinemas. Except for the Waterloo and the Victoria, all of them passed into the possession of Ufa , which together with James Henschel founded J. Henschel GmbH for this purpose.

swell

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Land Register Hamburg Uhlenhorst Volume 4, Sheet 164, Landbuch 750.