Max Eichholz

Max Eichholz (born December 3, 1881 in Hamburg , † January 12, 1943 in Auschwitz concentration camp ) was a German politician of the German Democratic Party (DDP); he was a victim of National Socialism .

Life and work

Max Eichholz was the son of the jeweler Franz Eichholz and his wife and women's rights activist Julie . He had a younger brother named Jaques (born March 24, 1884). Eichholz, who was of Jewish faith, studied law in Heidelberg , Marburg and Berlin after graduating from Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Hamburg-Rotherbaum . In 1904 he received his doctorate in law in Freiburg im Breisgau . He then did his internship in Hamburg and worked as a lawyer from 1907 . Within the Hamburg Jewish community he was active in the liberal temple association. In the First World War he served as a soldier. He was awarded the Iron Cross and the Hanseatic Cross.

After the First World War , Eichholz became involved in the Volksheim movement . In the 1920s he founded a law firm with the social democratic politician and lawyer Herbert Ruscheweyh and E. Häckermann in what was then Königstrasse (now Poststrasse) in Hamburg's Neustadt district , which quickly enjoyed a good reputation.

Stumbling block for Max Eichholz in Hamburg-Harvestehude, Mittelweg 89

In November 1935 and April 1937 he was arrested without trial and taken to the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp for several weeks, where he was mistreated. On September 30, 1938, the 5th ordinance on the Reich Citizenship Act revoked all Jewish lawyers' license. Eichholz also had to close his law firm, which he had run alone since 1935. After the November pogroms in 1938, he was arrested again and taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Although he was released again in January 1939, he was arrested again in March of the same year and sentenced to five years in prison on July 12 for alleged “ racial disgrace ”. On December 10, 1942, he was deported from prison to Auschwitz , where he was murdered in 1943.

Eichholz 'wife and his two sons were able to emigrate to Great Britain in time. He himself had refused to go abroad, because he said that he was protected as a combatant in the First World War and that he also wanted to continue to provide legal support to the Jewish community in Hamburg.

The Max-Eichholz-Ring in Hamburg-Lohbrügge and the primary school located there are named after him. In addition, a stumbling stone in front of his last residence at Mittelweg 89 in Hamburg-Harvestehude (see picture) and another in front of the Hamburg City Hall reminds of him .

Political party

Eichholz was a member of the German Democratic Party in the Weimar Republic . He was a member of the Club of October 3, founded in 1924 , an association of social democratic and liberal Hamburg politicians whose aim was on the one hand to promote cooperation between the two parties, and on the other hand they wanted to take action against anti-republican tendencies through conspiratorial work. Although he was opposed to the merger of the DDP with the Young German Order to form the German State Party , he did not resign because he - like Harald Abatz , for example - wanted to continue to work as a democratic conscience in the new party.

MP

Eichholz was a member of the Hamburg Parliament from 1921 to 1933 . He was known there as an important speaker and worked on various committees in the fields of construction, finance and social affairs. He was one of the first to strongly assert himself against the anti-Semitic agitation of National Socialist members of parliament. On September 30, 1930, he also self-critically confessed to the citizenship about dealing with the NSDAP and KPD:

"It was a fundamental mistake on our part to argue about democracy with those who only recognize the dictatorship"

On June 8, 2012, stumbling blocks were laid in front of the Hamburg City Hall for the murdered members of the Hamburg Parliament, including another for Max Eichholz.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kirsten Heinsohn: Eichholz, July . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 5 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0640-0 , p. 102 .
2. ↑ Quoted from: Stenographic reports of the Hamburg citizenship, year 1930, 19th session, page 834.
3. ↑ Stumbling blocks for murdered MdHB final inscriptions City Hall Hamburg (PDF file; 15 kB).

literature

• Manfred Asendorf: Paths to Democracy. 75 years of democratically elected Hamburg citizenship. Hamburg 1994
• Heiko Morisse: Jewish lawyers in Hamburg. Exclusion and persecution in the Nazi state. Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-7672-1418-0
• Ursula Wamser, Wilfried Weinke, Ulrich Bauche (eds.): A vanished world: Jewish life on the Grindel . Revised new edition Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-934920-98-5
• Wilfried Weinke: The persecution of Jewish lawyers in Hamburg using the example of Dr. Max Eichholz and Herbert Michaelis. In: Angelika Ebbinghaus, Karsten Linne (ed.): No closed chapter: Hamburg in the “Third Reich” . Hamburg 1997.
• Frank Müller: Members of the Citizenship. Victim of totalitarian persecution. 2nd, revised and expanded edition. Published by the citizens of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. Hamburg 1995, DNB 944894100 , pp. 28-31.
• Federal Bar Association (Hrsg.): Lawyer without law. Fate of Jewish lawyers in Germany after 1933. Berlin 2007, pp. 213/214
• Daniel Ihonor: Max Eichholz (1881–1943) - On the difficult course of a combative Hamburg lawyer. In: Late Commemoration. A history society remembers its excluded Jewish members, edited by Joist Grolle and Matthias Schmoock. Hamburg pictures of life in representations and personal testimonies, published by the Association for Hamburg History, Volume 21, Hamburg 2009, pp. 11–36.

Web links

Commons : Max Eichholz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files