Martha Kronenberg
Martha Kronenberg (born February 14, 1911 in Schwelm ; † December 6, 2009 there ) was a baker's daughter and bread seller who campaigned for persecuted Jewish citizens in Schwelm and neighboring Wuppertal during the Nazi era .
Kronenberg's commitment only became public knowledge 40 years later in Schwelm. To honor it, the city decided in September 2018 to give a projected street its name.
Life and commitment
Kronenberg came from a family of committed Catholics. Her father Johannes Kroonenberghs (1870–1947), a native of the Netherlands, immigrated to Germany around 1890 and set up his own bakery in Schwelm. He held on to his Dutch citizenship for life and only gave his own family name a Germanized version under National Socialist pressure. With his wife Auguste, b. Aust from Oelkinghausen , he had nine children, including Martha as the youngest daughter. From childhood on, she was assigned the tasks of a bread carrier and saleswoman in the family business.
As part of the Catholic community of Schwelms, the Kronenberg family opposed the emergence of National Socialism in the 1930s. All members of the family were later certified to have been involved in the resistance against Nazi rule in the area. They benefited from the public character of their house with an attached large bakery. Camouflaged in customer and delivery traffic, the house developed into a point of intersection in the network of the city's Catholic resistance.
Following the example of her parents, Martha Kronenberg began to campaign primarily for the oppressed and disenfranchised Jewish citizens. At the end of 1938 she was denounced and charged in court with the charge of recommending treatment to a Jewish doctor to an acquaintance. During the trial, she refused to withdraw her defendant statement.
From 1939 on, Kronenberg began to support older and single Jewish women in Schwelm and the nearby Wuppertal. In violation of the law, she regularly visits the emerging “ Jewish houses ” and smuggles food and coal to the oppressed. The night's darkness as well as air raids , and occasionally a Jewish star pinned to one's chest, served as one's own camouflage . The circle of those seeking help grew steadily for them in the 1940s with increasing repression and persecution of the remaining Jews. Most recently, in July 1942, Kronenberg accompanied the women in Wuppertal to the departure station of their deportation to the concentration camp .
The anti-system activities of the Kronenberg family were not unknown to the National Socialist authorities in Schwelm and led to intensive observation by the Gestapo , including repeated house searches in Potthoffstrasse (today No. 10) . Meanwhile, the authorities did not succeed in prosecuting the well-known and respected baker family. Above all, Kronenbergs protected the firm integration into the Catholic community, whose network also included Otto Happ (1891–1980), the head of the police authority of Schwelm and the Ennepe-Ruhr district .
In the basement of his own house, Kronenberg hid the last of the valuables of the ladies she looked after behind a drawn-in tarn, and other valuables were buried in the garden. They remained undiscovered during the Gestapo searches . After the war, Kronenberg restituted the property to the descendants of the murdered.
In 1941, Kronenberg approached a Jewish citizen of about the same age on the street and offered her help. With Erna Cohn, geb. Marcus (1908–2000) soon shared an intense friendship, to which she also regularly visited their apartment and parents' house, then Schwelm's only “Jewish house” ( today Bahnhofstrasse 37 ). Despite cautiously camouflaging her visits only at night, Kronenberg firmly assumed that she was being watched and denounced by neighbors. She continued the visits until Cohn was deported from Schwelm in 1943.
In order to help her friend while she was still in the concentration camp, Kronenberg organized regular camouflaged parcel delivery of groceries to a dummy address in the Theresienstadt camp . Cohn received the parcels for a year before they were transported to the Auschwitz extermination camp in 1944 . Cohn survived the Holocaust and emigrated to the USA in 1946.
Shortly before the end of the war, all members of the Kronenberg family were entered on a "black list" of the Schwelm Nazi authorities, sentenced to immediate liquidation if the system was expected to collapse. The Catholic network around police chief Otto Happ is said to have contributed to the rescue of the family when, in an unexplained manner, the list burned a little later in the offices of the police.
After the end of the war, Kronenberg volunteered to restore the Schwelm Jewish cemetery, which had previously been vandalized and largely destroyed . For Artur Cohn, the husband of her friend Erna, who died in 1943, she had a burial site built for the first time ( photo at Commons ). In the following decades, members of the Marcus family, including Erna, repeatedly emigrated from the USA to visit Kronenberg in Schwelm and expressed their gratitude to the former helper many times over and for a lifetime.
In 1975 the Marcus family invited Kronenberg to visit the USA. On this occasion, the local newspaper "Richmond News Leader" carried memories of the two friends from the Nazi era in Schwelm to the public for the first time. It took another five years for Kronenberg's commitment to become known for the first time in Schwelm through an article by the Verein für Heimatkunde in 1980.
In 1989, 78-year-old Kronenberg presented her memories in detail in a radio interview for the Schwelm-born journalist Marion Kollbach. In 2016, the same memories were worked out again in extensive research and documentation for the Verein für Heimatkunde.
At the suggestion of Saraswati Albano-Müller, the city of Schwelm paid tribute to Kronenberg in 2009 with an honoring portrait photo and an explanatory board in the town hall. In September 2018 the Schwelm city council decided to designate a planned street as the future “Martha-Kronenberg-Weg”.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Albano-Müller (2016) pp. 12–38
- ↑ Albano-Müller (2016) pp. 37–38, 53–54
- ↑ Albano-Müller (2016) pp. 76-77
- ↑ Article reproduced in: Wollmerstädt pp. 42–45; (Erna Cohn then changed to the name Speier in her second marriage)
- ↑ s. Sources: Wollmerstädt 1980
- ↑ s. Sources: Kollbach 1990
- ↑ s. Sources: Albano-Müller 2016
- ↑ Albano-Müller (2016) p. 10
- ↑ Official announcement of the city of Schwelm from September 28, 2018 (PDF) (accessed March 29, 2019)
swell
- Albano-Müller, Marc: "Miss Herz, do you want to eat with us?". Martha Kronenberg and Erna Speier-Cohn talk. Two swelter women defy National Socialism . In: Contributions to the local history of the city of Schwelm and its surroundings, 65th issue, 2016. pp. 7–55; 66-67; 74-78
- Albano-Müller, Marc: “I wasn't afraid”. The Schwelmerin Martha Kronenberg also helped Jews from Barmen . In: Westdeutsche Zeitung (Wuppertal), June 1, 2017
- Gutknecht, Gisela: Of a strength that is also sufficient for others. Contemporary witness Martha Kronenberg . In: Journal für Schwelm (Ed .: Stadt Schwelm), issue 2005. pp. 50–51
- Happ, Elmar (2006): Upright against the current . Publisher Hans Meyer. ISBN 3890142583 . Pp. 10–13, 133 (on connections between the Kronenberg and Happ families)
- Kollbach, Marion; Jung, Nadine (Ed.): I just want to tell you about my life . material-Verlag, Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg, 2002. (Transcription of a radio interview from 1989/90, see the following source)
- Kollbach, Marion: 56 Pechmaries , radio interview with Martha Kronenberg and Erna Speier-Cohn, WDR and SFB, 1990
- Wollmerstädt, Kurt: From the history of the Jews in Schwelm . In: Contributions to the local history of the city of Schwelm and its surroundings, 30th issue, 1980. pp. 41–45
- Former bread woman thinks of old times. 100 years of bakery . In: Westfälische Rundschau (Schwelm), February 17, 1996
- Martha Kronenberg helped with bread and coal. The "angel from Schwelm" risked his life. She was on the “black list” of the Nazis - a visit from the USA . In: Westfälische Rundschau (Schwelm), May 8, 1987
- Reunion with memories of the daughter's school. Visit from the USA in Schwelm . In: Westfälische Rundschau (Schwelm), July 24, 1985
- Reunion with Martha Kronenberg: "We would never have dreamed of that". Natalja Ochtisowna and Maria Stjoshka visiting on Potthoffstrasse yesterday . In: Westfälische Rundschau (Schwelm), July 3, 2003
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kronenberg, Martha |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German baker's daughter and Jewish helper during the National Socialist era |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 14, 1911 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Schwelm |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 6, 2009 |
| Place of death | Schwelm |