Lucy Borchard

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Lucy Borchard , born May , before 1938 Borchardt (born December 10, 1877 in Hamburg , † February 4, 1969 in London ) was a German shipowner and owner of the Fairplay tugboat shipping company Richard Borchardt, founded in Hamburg in 1905 .

Life

Lucy May was a daughter of the doctor Siegmund May. She worked for five years as a teacher at a Hamburg girls' school , which later became Emilie-Wüstenfeld-Gymnasium . In 1902 she married Richard Borchardt, who at that time was employed as a commercial clerk at the stevedoring and maneuvering company Carl Tiedemann . The company became the Fairplay shipping company in 1905 under Borchardt's management, and in 1924 he became its sole owner. The couple had five children and lived in a house on Rainweg in Hamburg-Eppendorf . Lucy Borchardt took over the management of the company during the First World War , after her husband signed up for the Imperial Navy in 1915 . She stayed with the company as an authorized signatory after the war . After Richard Borchardt's death in 1930 she took over the management.

The Fairplay tug fleet in the port of Hamburg, winter 1929

After the National Socialists came to power , Lucy Borchardt, who was of Jewish descent, got involved in the Hachschara for young people who wanted to emigrate to Palestine and made it possible for them to do a seaman apprenticeship in her company. Completed training was the prerequisite for entering Palestine. Around forty young people have completed vocational training at the shipping company on this basis. It also enabled Jewish emigrants to pass on their cargo ships, which they sold to Palestine in the mid-1930s.

From 1936, Lucy Borchardt and her shipping company came under increasing pressure, in particular the Hamburg Foreign Exchange Office and the Reich Office for Foreign Exchange Management intervened in the operation of the "non-Aryan company". In 1938, Borchardt converted the company into a foundation that the shipping company in Hamburg would maintain and benefit the company's employees. In return, she managed to take three of her ships into exile as emigration goods. In summer 1938, she emigrated to London from her children were previously to Palestine and Britain emigrated . Her assets that remained in Germany were completely confiscated. The Fair Play Foundation came under the directive of the Reich Governor Karl Kaufmann . Lucy Borchardt's German citizenship was revoked in November 1940.

The transferred from Germany touts Lucy Borchard founded - the family changed its name in emigration and from then wrote it without the t at the end - in London, the Fairplay Towage & Shipping Co.Ltd. After the war , her son Kurt Borchard returned to Hamburg and, after lengthy negotiations in a reparation process, got the shipping company to return it. Lucy Borchard stayed in London and founded Borchard Lines Ltd. in 1953 . and died in 1969 at the age of 91.

The Fairplay shipping company is still family-owned, now in the fourth generation, as an international haulage company with its main office still in Hamburg.

Commemoration

Several women's associations and local committees from various parties have campaigned for a street in HafenCity to be named after Lucy Borchard. On March 27, 2013, this request was granted by the Hamburg citizenship and it was decided that one of the new streets in the newly built Elbbrücken district should be called Lucy-Borchardt-Straße . It leads from Versmannstrasse to Baakenwerder Strasse.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Merchant Marine Hachshara in Hamburg (1935–1938) - Lucy Borchardt: "The only Jewish female ship owner in the world" ( Memento of the original from January 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked . Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www1.uni-hamburg.de
  2. ↑ Hans Jürgen Witthöft: Fair play - that's what the name stands for. Chronicle of a German haulage company , Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, Hamburg 2008, p. 39.
  3. ↑ Ulrich Bauche (ed.): The history of the Jews in Hamburg . Hamburg 1991, p. 450.
  4. ^ Frank Bajohr: "Aryanization" in Hamburg. The displacement of Jewish entrepreneurs 1933–1945 , Hamburg 1997, p. 262.
  5. ↑ BORCHARD LINES LIMITED - Filing history (free information from Companies House). Retrieved May 27, 2020 (English).
  6. ↑ Official Gazette of April 5, 2013 , accessed on July 29, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Borchard, Lucy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Borchardt, Lucy; May, Lucy (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German shipowner
DATE OF BIRTH December 10, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH 4th February 1969
Place of death London