Ludwig Loeffler

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Ludwig Loeffler (born September 2, 1906 in Hamburg ; † May 23, 1989 ibid) was a German lawyer who headed the reparation office in Hamburg and was a member of the board of directors of the Jewish community .

Live and act

Ludwig Loeffler attended the secondary school named after Anton Rée at the Zeughausmarkt in Hamburg and the Thaer secondary school at the Holstentor, where he graduated from high school in 1925. He then studied six semesters Law at the University of Geneva , the University of Freiburg and the University of Hamburg . After the first state examination in Hamburg in July 1928, he was five years later when Kurt Perels Dr. jur. PhD . In his dissertation he dealt withSelf-government and state supervision in Hamburg municipal law . After a legal traineeship in Hamburg, he passed the Great State Examination in February 1932. He then worked as an assessor in the administration of the Hanseatic city . Since Loeffler was of Jewish descent, he had to give up the job on April 7, 1933 due to the law to restore the civil service .

In 1934 Loeffler took over the management of Bruno Gätjens & Co. , which handled imports and transits. After the pogroms in November 1938 , the National Socialists imprisoned around 1,000 male Jews from Hamburg for several weeks in the Fuhlsbüttel police prison . Loeffler was one of the inmates between the ages of 17 and 70. After his release, he took on a position as legal counsel in the finance department of the German-Israelite Congregation, which in 1938 had been forcibly renamed the Jewish Religious Association in Hamburg . He also worked in the district office of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, which is responsible for north-west Germany .

After the Gestapo dissolved the remaining Jewish communities on June 12, 1943, they deported numerous Jews from Hamburg. Loeffler was taken to the Theresienstadt ghetto together with almost all of the members of the Hamburg Jewish community . His parents and relatives died there. Loeffler spent the following period next to the Theresienstadt ghetto in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and in the Friedland subcamp of the Groß-Rosen concentration camp . From here he was able to flee in early 1945 before the concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army . After a walk, Loeffler reached his hometown on June 23, 1945.

After the end of the Nazi regime, Loeffler first headed the Advice Center for Reparation and Refugee Aid from July 1945, and from December 1945 then the newly established Reparation Office. In the middle of the preparation of the Hamburg Detention Compensation Act, he was transferred to the Department of Economics and Transport in 1949. The Reparation Office was dissolved. Those persecuted by the Nazis were worried. Hendrik George van Dam , who later became General Secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany , had previously viewed the transfer as a harbinger of a "later dismantling" of the Reparation Office. At the beginning of the 1950s, he placed them in the context of a "crossfire" to which the West German reparation officers were exposed. By this he meant the departure of a group of Nazi-persecuted heads of state compensation authorities of Jewish origin, including Ludwig Loeffler, Philipp Auerbach (Bavaria), Curt Epstein (Hesse), Marcel Frenkel (North Rhine-Westphalia) and Alphonse Kahn (Rhineland-Palatinate).

Loeffler worked from 1949 to 1954 at his new workplace as a senior specialist. Until his retirement in 1971, he also held a management position in the social services department.

In addition to his professional activities, Loeffler was committed to rebuilding the Jewish community in Hamburg . He had been a member of the Executive Board since it was re-established and played an important role in its reorganization after the war. Until 1973 he was a member of the council of the community. Loeffler took over the chairmanship of the Jewish Community Fund North Germany and was involved in the child and youth alijah and was involved in several aid and solidarity campaigns that had a connection to Israel. For several decades he was a member of the board of trustees of the Israelite Hospital and took over the deputy chairmanship of this body.

In 1986 the Hamburg Senate awarded Ludwig Loeffler the silver medal for loyal work in the service of the people .

literature

  • Nils Asmussen, The Short Dream of Justice: "Reparation" and victims of Nazi persecution in Hamburg after 1945, Hamburg 1987
  • Nicola Graf: Loeffler, Ludwig . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 3 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-8353-0081-4 , p. 230-232 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ All information in this section: Boris Spernol: In the crossfire of the cold war. The Marcel Frenkel case and the repression of the communists , in: Norbert Frei / José Brunner / Constantin Goschler (eds.): The practice of reparation. History, experience and impact in Germany and Israel (series of publications by the Minerva Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University, vol. 28), Göttingen 2009, pp. 203–236, here: p. 203.
personal data
SURNAME Loeffler, Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, head of the Office for Reparation in Hamburg and board member of the local Jewish community
DATE OF BIRTH September 2, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH May 23, 1989
Place of death Hamburg