Ludwig Loewenthal

Ludwig Loewenthal with his wife Rose and son Willi

Ludwig Loewenthal , alternatively: Ludwig Löwenthal (born March 20, 1898 in Bad Kissingen ; † February 21, 1944 in Theresienstadt concentration camp ) was a German-Jewish banker .

Life

Advertisement for the Loewenthal banking house (around 1925)

Loewenthal came from a long-established Bad Kissinger family. His father William Loewenthal , a cattle dealer, married Amanda Bamberger, who grew up in Wiesenfeld near Karlstadt , in 1890 . Ludwig had three older siblings, the older sister Irma and two brothers. On his 29th birthday he married Rose Kohn from Gerolzhofen, who was three years his junior . Her parents Hermann and Amalie Kohn ran a machine and iron business there.

In 1922, Loewenthal founded a banking business in Bad Kissingen from a small start, which was in a prominent location on the corner of Ludwigstrasse and Theresienstrasse. In addition to the usual money and currency transactions , the bank earned its money with insurance business. There was also a representation in the bank for large shipping companies such as the Cunard Line , Anchor Line and the Donaldson Line shipping company . Loewenthal advertised with the "transportation of passengers and shipment of goods to all parts of the world" .

Loewenthal played an important role not only professionally, but also politically in Bad Kissingen's city life and was committed to countering the emergence of National Socialism in the spa town. He was secretary in the Kissinger local group of the left-liberal " German Democratic Party " (DDP), which tried to support the Weimar Republic as the first democratic form of government in Germany. He was also a founding member of the Bad Kissinger section of the “ Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold ”. Because of his political commitment, Loewenthal was one of the first Bad Kissingen Jews against whom the National Socialists acted after they "came to power ".

In March 1933 he was temporarily taken into “ protective custody ”. After his release, the National Socialists organized a rally in front of his bank on May 20, 1933, during which chants demanded that the Bad Kissingen banker be arrested again. Loewenthal was arrested the same day and transferred to the regional court prison in Schweinfurt . After his release, he did not return to Bad Kissingen, but lived with his brother Martin in Munich and Bad Tölz for a few months . The two arrests must have convinced the banker that there would be no future for him and his family in Nazi Germany.

So Loewenthal decided to emigrate to the Netherlands . Between October 1933 and January 1936 he and his family lived in The Hague . They then lived in Voorburg , a city northeast of The Hague, for several months before moving to Amsterdam in November 1936 . According to the residents' registration card, Loewenthal ran a bike shop there. In addition, he received a pension from Germany. He received monthly payments from the "Rheinische Girozentrale und Provinzialbank" ( Aachen branch ). The Loewenthal family was not alone in Amsterdam. In September 1937 they were followed by the family of his sister Irma, who lived there on the same street. Ludwig's in-laws, Hermann and Amalie Kohn, also lived in Amsterdam from February 1939.

The National Socialists had a plan to confiscate Loewenthal's property, so they checked whether the banker had any tax debts with the tax office in Bad Kissingen or Bad Neustadt (Saale) . If so, they could have expatriated him immediately and confiscated his property. This plan failed, however, because detailed research by the Bad Kissingen tax office and the state tax office in Würzburg showed that Loewenthal was a well-off man: his banking transactions resulted in claims of around 90,000 Reichsmarks . In addition, he owned a deposit and securities account worth 13,000 marks and two smaller pieces of land with a total value of 5,900 marks. So that the Moabit-West tax office in Berlin could confiscate the entire property, Loewenthal, his wife and son were withdrawn from their German citizenship on October 26, 1937 . In addition, attempts were made to prove that Loewenthal's former authorized signatory Alfred Amrhein from Winkels had financed the purchase of his nursery with funds from the Loewenthal bank. However, this proof could not be provided.

Stumbling blocks for Ludwig Loewenthal and his son Willi

After the German Wehrmacht occupied the Netherlands in May 1940, everyday life for the Loewenthal family in Amsterdam also deteriorated. Three years later, Loewenthal was 1-199 with the transport XXIV / April 22, 1943 by there to the concentration camp Theresienstadt deported , where he died on February 21 1944th

His wife Rose , who had registered in Holland with her maiden name Rose Kohn , was able to survive the Holocaust . Apparently she managed to go into hiding in Amsterdam, because her registration card does not contain a registration number by the German occupation forces or a note about the deportation to a concentration camp . From November 1946 she lived in New York City , where she remarried and took the surname Lowell .

In memory of Ludwig Loewenthal and his then 15-year-old son Willi , who perished in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp , Gunter Demnig , initiator of the international “ Stolpersteine ” campaign, laid two such stones in front of the house at Ludwigstrasse 5 on September 22, 2010 .

Web links

• Ludwig Loewenthal . In: Biografisches-Gedenkbuch-BK.de
• Ludwig Loewenthal . In: BadKissingen.de
• Ludwig Loewenthal . In: Bundesarchiv.de
• Ludwig Loewenthal . In: Central database of the names of the Holocaust victims
• Ludwig Loewenthal . In: JoodsMonument.nl (English, Dutch)