Karl Loewenstein (banker)
Karl Loewenstein , also Karl Loesten or Lowen or Levensteen , (* May 2, 1887 in Siegen , † 1976 in Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler ) was a German private bank director who was head of the security system of the Jewish self-government for a while during his internment in the Theresienstadt ghetto was. He was born a Jew, and in 1917 married Margot Hamburger, who was also Jewish. In 1919 he converted to the Protestant faith.
Life
Loewenstein traveled in the vicinity of the German Crown Prince Wilhelm and took part in the First World War as an imperial naval officer in the North Sea outpost flotilla, where he served as a signal officer. He was awarded the Iron Cross II and I Class and the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern . After the war he took part in the fighting in Upper Silesia on the side of the Freikorps . From 1924 to 1941 he worked as a banker and director of the Busse & Co , a Berlin private bank. Karl Loewenstein was involved at the level of the Evangelical Church Community Berlin-Weißensee as a co-founder of its denominational community for the Confessing Church and thus aroused the displeasure of the National Socialist rulers . The Gestapo arrested him in November 1941 and deported him to the notorious Minsk ghetto . In May 1942 he was due to intervention of the Commissioner General for Belarus Wilhelm Kube by way of Vienna to the Theresienstadt ghetto spent, where he was initially detained and received special rations. On September 23, 1942, the camp commandant Siegfried Seidl appointed him head of security in the ghetto and thus, after the Jewish elder , one of the most important functionaries within the Jewish self-government in Theresienstadt.
He organized the fire brigade and other facilities of the ghetto watch. Due to his personal courage, he was able to mediate between the camp commandant and SS on the one hand and the prisoners of the ghetto on the other in a large number of often delicate cases. However, this also led to hostility and intrigues from the ghetto itself, and Loewenstein had a difficult and undiplomatic personality. Finally, the ghetto court dismissed him from his position in what was subsequently described as questionable and sentenced him to a four-month prison term. Accordingly, his role has been controversially assessed by fellow survivors and by historians to this day. After the war he moved first to Great Britain, Peterborough, to his younger son, then to Australia to his older son Fred Lowen (née Friedrich), and then to West Berlin , where he died very old .
Fonts
- From hell Minsk to 'paradise' Theresienstadt. Typescript in the archive of the Leo Baeck Institute , New York City ( digitized at the Center for Jewish History )
- Minsk. In the camp of the German Jews. Bonn 1961 (also: Minsk - Im Lager der Deutschen Juden. In: Supplement to the weekly newspaper Das Parlament . B 45/46 of November 7, 1956, pp. 706–718) (= 1st part of Aus der Hölle Minsk ... )
- Correspondence with HG Adler, Adler estate, German Literature Archive Marbach .
- His investigations before the Litoměřice People's Court, archive of the Czech Interior Ministry.
literature
- Axel Feuss: The Theresienstadt convolute . Altonaer Museum in Hamburg, Dölling and Galitz Verlag, Hamburg / Munich 2002, ISBN 3-935549-22-9 .
Web links
- Loewenstein in the Theresienstadt Lexicon
- on Karl Loewenstein in the collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Loewenstein, Karl |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Loesten, Karl; Levensteen, Karl |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German private bank director, naval officer and survivor of the Holocaust |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 2, 1887 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Wins |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1976 |
| Place of death | Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler |