Martin Finkelgruen

Martin Finkelgruen ( May 5, 1876 in Berlin - December 10, 1942 in Theresienstadt ) was a German merchant who was beaten to death by SS guard Anton Malloth during the Shoah .

life and death

Martin Finkelgruen was the owner of a department store in Bamberg . He was born with Julie born in Berlin. Löwenstein married. The couple had two children, their son Hans Leo (born 1908) and their five years younger daughter Dora. When his wife fell ill and finally returned to Berlin, when he got into business problems due to the global economic crisis , he developed a love affair with Anna Bartl, a Christian. As a result, his son fell in love with their daughter Ernestine nee. Bartl (born July 1, 1913, also called Esti) and married her. Both relationships were seen by the National Socialists as so-called “ racial disgrace ”. The two couples fled first to Karlsbad , after the occupation of the Sudetenland by the National Socialists, to Prague. “There it was not yet a criminal offense for them to live together. It was the beginning of their mutual escape. Now they were all traveling ”.

While Martin Finkelgruen's two children were able to flee, he and his partner stayed in Prague after the defeat of Czechoslovakia and the German occupation. Anna Bartl hid him and went on with his business. The two were denounced, arrested on November 30, 1942 and deported, Finkelgruen because he was Jewish, Bartl because she had hidden him. The Gestapo man who arrested the two is said to have said to Anna Bartl: “You will not go with this man and you will never touch him again”. Martin Finkelgruen was deported to the Small Fortress Theresienstadt , where he was beaten to death by SS guard Anton Malloth immediately after his arrival .

Anna Bartl survived the Ravensbrück , Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps .

family

Daughter Dora had joined the Zionist movement and had emigrated to Palestine with her husband in time with a detour via Sweden . She was now called Rachel, her husband Gerhard took the name Israel.

Son Hans and his wife Ernestine were able to flee to Shanghai in time . They founded a small shop selling gloves and leather goods there. Martin Fingelgruen's only grandson, Peter Finkelgruen , was born on March 9, 1942 in Shanghai . The family lived in poverty and poor sanitary conditions, plagued by rats and diseases. In 1943 Hans Finkelgruen died in the Shanghai ghetto . In 1946 Ernestine Finkelgruen returned to Prague, seriously ill, with her little son, where her mother lived. She died on May 31, 1950 as a result of hardship and illnesses that she contracted in the Shanghai ghetto. Peter Finkelgruen, who graduated from elementary school in Prague, went to Israel with his grandmother in 1951, where he attended the Tabeetha School in Jaffa and graduated from high school. He and his grandmother then moved to Germany, where he studied, became a journalist and writer. In 1978 he married the writer Gertrud Seehaus . When he visited his 90-year-old aunt Bela in 1989, she told him about the murder of her husband and son in the Small Fortress Theresienstadt , a Gestapo prison, but also how Peter's grandfather was murdered there. This resulted in two autobiographical books in the 1990s on the one hand, which dealt in particular with the fate of his grandfather and his murderer, who lived unaffected in Germany, and on the other hand, a ten-year struggle that Anton Malloth should be held responsible for his atrocities.

Conviction of the murderer

With the exception of a short extradition detention in Innsbruck, the murderer Martin Finkelgruens, Anton Malloth , lived undisturbed until 1988 in Meran , South Tyrol, where he also owned a house. In 1988 he was deported by the Italian authorities to Munich and then lived with the support of a daughter of Heinrich Himmler and with social assistance in a retirement home in Pullach near Munich. Proceedings against him were dropped a total of three times in Germany. Multiple extradition requests from Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic were rejected. Malloth was arrested 55 years after the fall of the Nazi regime, on May 25, 2000. One year later he was sentenced to life imprisonment in Munich, but died the following year.

Commemoration

In March 2012, a memorial stone for Martin and Peter Finkelgruen was unveiled and a tree was planted at the intersection of Sülzgürtel and Berrenrather Strasse in Cologne . A metal memorial plaque with the following inscription was placed on a boulder:

"This tree was planted on the occasion of the 70th birthday of the Cologne-based Jewish writer Peter Finkelgruen, in memory of his grandfather Martin Finkelgruen (1876–1942) who was murdered in the Small Camp Theresienstadt"

In June 2016 the memorial stone was desecrated (by painting over the plaque with white paint). Peter Finkelgruen responded with the following words: “It took four years and four months from the erection of the memorial stone to the first desecration. A short period of time? A long time? Such is the situation in this country. In this city."

Literature about Martin Finkelgruen

• Peter Finkelgruen : House of Germany. The story of an unpunished murder . Rowohlt Verlag, Berlin 1992.
• Peter Finkelgruen: Erlkönigs Reich. The story of a deception . Rowohlt Verlag, Berlin 1997.
• Joshua Sobol : The beautiful Toni , play. World premiere at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus , 1993.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Finkelgruen: House of Germany , p. 66.
2. ↑ This formulation comes from the theater text by Sobol, reproduced in Finkelgruen: Erlkönigs Reich , p. 98.
3. ↑ Roland Kaufhold : PETER FINKELGRUEN: From Shanghai via Prague and Israel to Cologne , journal21.ch, March 4, 2012, accessed on June 9, 2017
4. ↑ Georg Bönisch: SS-VERBRECHEN: Killed out of boredom , Der Spiegel (Hamburg), 26/2000, accessed on June 9, 2017
5. ^ City of Cologne : On the 70th birthday of Peter Finkelgruen , accessed on June 9, 2017
6. ↑ hagalil.com (Jewish life online): Anti-Semitic manuscript , accessed on June 9, 2017

Web links

• Works by and about Martin Finkelgruen in the catalog of the German National Library