Max Raphael Hahn

Max Raphael Hahn (born April 22, 1880 in Göttingen ; died March 1942 in Riga ) was a Jewish entrepreneur, chairman of the Jewish community in Göttingen and art collector.

Life

The family's residential and commercial building, Weender Str. 70

Stumbling blocks for the Hahn family

Max Raphael Hahn was the youngest son of the Jewish businessman Raphael Hahn (born May 27, 1831 in Rhina, died December 22, 1915 in Göttingen), who came from the Hessian town of Rhina , and his wife, Hannchen Blaut, who came from Geisa in Thuringia (born 25 November 1837 in Geisa, died November 24, 1908 in Göttingen). Raphael Hahn came to Göttingen in 1858 and founded a branch of the family business specializing in the trade in skins and casings . In 1860 he had married; the couple had a total of 12 children, but only seven of them survived infancy and toddlerhood. In 1864, Raphael Hahn acquired the large house at Weender Strasse 63 (today 70) in Göttingen, which was to become the family seat, which is still remembered by an inscription that was renewed in the 1960s.

In 1896, Max Raphael Hahn entered his father's business, in which his eldest brother Nathan (born November 27, 1868 in Göttingen, murdered in September 1942 in Treblinka ) had been working since 1887 . The two brothers ran the business, in which the father - although no longer officially managing director since 1899 - still took a lively interest until his death in 1915, until the family was expelled by the National Socialists in 1940. Nathan and Max Raphael Hahn managed to make the Raphael Hahn company, Göttingen , which later included a shoe factory as well as extensive real estate , into the most successful Jewish company in Göttingen and one of the most successful companies in the city.

During the First World War , both brothers made themselves available to the army administration: Under the direction of Nathan Hahn, the company camps served as a collection warehouse for hides and cases that were needed for the troop equipment, and Max Raphael Hahn worked as a leather expert for the Prussian war raw materials department initially in Leipzig , then in Vienna and Budapest .

Villa Merkelstrasse 3

Memorial plaques at Villa Merkelstrasse 3

In February 1919 Max Raphael Hahn, who in June 1917 married Gertrud Lasch, who came from a Halberstadt glove dynasty (born July 14, 1893 in Halberstadt, murdered 1941 in Riga ), returned to Göttingen and bought a villa in the early September 1919 Merkelstrasse 3, where their son Rudolf was born on December 3, 1919 and their daughter Hanni on March 22, 1922.

Max Raphael and Gertrud Hahn both grew up in Orthodox Judaism , and so the family's life was based on the rhythm of the Jewish holidays. The Hahns also kept the Shabbat rest, although the entire Christian environment worked on that day. But unlike their parents before, Max Raphael and Gertrud Hahn reconciled the orthodox with the reform Judaism prevailing in Göttingen , which had materialized in the large Old Synagogue in the Lower Masch 1 , which was expanded in 1895 , to the after the destruction of November 9 and 10, 1938, the memorial erected in 1973 on the Synagogue Square is commemorated. After the synagogue was built, there was still a small Orthodox community in Göttingen, which was called the exit community because its members had resigned from their seats in the new synagogue. And originally not only Raphael Hahn, the progenitor of the family, but also his sons Nathan and Max Raphael belonged to this exit congregation. But after the First World War and his return to Göttingen, Max Raphael Hahn joined the reform-oriented Jewish majority community and in October 1921 became one of the three leaders of the community. He held this office with impressive continuity for almost twenty years until he was expelled from Göttingen in April 1940.

During his long tenure in office, Max Raphael Hahn became - as the Göttingen rabbi Hermann Ostfeld later put it - the dominant personality of the Göttingen Jewish community and shaped its fortunes internally and externally for decades. In addition, together with his wife Gertrud, he was involved in the Göttingen branch of the Jewish Moritz-Lazarus-Loge, whose name can also be read as a program: The Göttingen Lodge was named after the left-liberal Jewish philosopher Moritz Lazarus , who died in 1903 had sought in his writings to combine religious and national identity and was the most prominent lay leader of liberal Judaism at the end of the 19th century. The influence of the lodge, to which all wealthy and educated men of the Jewish community belonged, went far beyond its mostly not particularly high number of members. In particular, the lodges were instrumental in building a modern network of Jewish welfare in Germany. In accordance with its statutes, the lodge required each of its members to provide evidence at any time that "Judaism is synonymous with righteous behavior, with the practice of the highest principles of ethics and humanity , that the confession of the Jewish religion does honor to the Jew" (from the Laws of the Göttingen local group of the lodge from 1921, p. 4). The president of the lodge was elected by the members for a two-year term. Max Raphael Hahn also held this office at least once in the period before 1933.

Women were excluded from membership in the lodges. But since 1886 there were sisterhoods affiliated to the lodges. In 1933 (and maybe even earlier, for which no documents have been obtained), the sister union of the Moritz Lazarus Lodge in Göttingen was headed by Gertrud Hahn.

During the time of persecution, Max Raphael Hahn was the dormant pole in the congregation, who, despite his own great worries, personally looked after all congregation members in need, helped some to emigrate and had a word of comfort for many. The young Rabbi Hermann Ostfeld, who was only 23 years old when he was called to Göttingen in 1935 and who changed his name to Zvi Hermon after his emigration to Palestine in October 1938, later wrote memories of his time in Göttingen and included an impressive picture of him unobtrusive, caring work of Max Raphael Hahn in the community.

Of the originally almost 500 Jewish residents of Göttingen, only about 220 were still living in Göttingen in October 1938. Almost without exception, they fell victim to the brutal attacks by the SS and SA, which broke into apartments or business premises on the night of the Reichspogromnacht from November 9th to 10th, 1938 , but also on the following two days, devastated the facilities, plundered the camps, the Residents mistreated and arrested men, women and children without distinction. As wealthy Jews, Max Raphael Hahn and his family were exposed to particular harassment . In the middle of the night of November 10th, around two in the morning, SS men broke into the villa at Merkelstrasse 3 with axes, woke the Hahns from their sleep and devastated their home. They smashed the doors and windows and destroyed furniture, works of art and antiques and drove the family out into the streets in their nightgowns. Max Raphael and Gertrud Hahn, his brother Nathan and his wife Betty, whose apartment at Baurat Gerber Strasse 19 had also been devastated, were arrested. The two women were released the next day, and Nathan Hahn returned home on November 19, 1938. Only Max Raphael Hahn was the only one who remained in custody until July 15, 1939. That was the reason why he and his wife did not manage to emigrate in time, for which relatives in the USA and England had already prepared everything. Her two children managed to escape to England in 1939.

After Hahn's enterprises had to be liquidated on March 1, 1939 as a result of the long systematic robbery of the Jewish population, Max Raphael and Gertrud Hahn moved to Hamburg in April 1940 in the hope of being able to emigrate from there. But this hope was in vain. On December 6, 1941, they were deported from Hamburg to Riga. Gertrud Hahn, who was diabetic , may have died on the transport, Max Raphael Hahn was murdered in March 1942 at the latest during the so-called Operation Dünamünde , a large shooting operation in a forest near Riga.

The son Rudolf emigrated from Great Britain to Cape Town and changed his name to Roger Hayden . He is the father of the Canadian geneticist Michael R. Hayden .

Max Raphael Hahn's Judaica Collection

Max Raphael Hahn was not only a successful and (before 1933) very respected entrepreneur in Göttingen, certainly the most important chairman in the history of the Göttingen Jewish community, but also an important collector, and above all, if not exclusively, a collector of Judaica , i.e. of Jewish cult objects. His Judaica collection was not particularly large compared to that of other important collectors, but it was of such high quality that it was included in the Philo-Lexikon, first published in 1934 by the Berlin Philo-Verlag . Handbook of Jewish Knowledge in one breath with the collections of the Rothschilds and the Sassoons (a Jewish family mainly active in Baghdad, Persia, India and Hong Kong and Shanghai, who are known as the “Rothschilds of the East”). Max Raphael's father, Raphael Hahn, had already started collecting Judaica, his son Rudolf (Roger Hayden) and his sons Jonathan and Michael continued this tradition.

The book "The Legacy of Max Raphael Hahn. Göttingen Citizens and Collectors - A History of Life and." Is dedicated to the fate of the Hahn's Judaica collection, which was confiscated by the Nazi judiciary. It was written in collaboration with the descendants of the Hahn family by the Göttingen historian Cordula Tollmien Death, Courageous Perseverance and the Enduring Power of Family Tradition ", published in 2014 by Hogrefe Verlag .

In 2019 the Vancouver Holocaust Education Center is hosting an exhibition on the history of the family and its collection.

memory

On November 8, 2017, a memorial plaque for the Hahn couple was unveiled at their villa in Merkelstrasse.

Since February 7, 2018, eight stumbling blocks in front of the residential and commercial building at Göttinger Weender Strasse 70 have been remembering the fate of Max Raphael Hahn and his relatives.

Literature and Sources

• Zvi Hermon: From pastor to criminologist. Rabbi in Göttingen. Prison reformer and psychotherapist in Israel. A life story . Otto Schwartz & Co, Göttingen 1990, ISBN 3-509-01520-7 .
• Alex Bruns-Wüstefeld: Profitable business. The "Entjudung der Wirtschaft using the example of Göttingen . Fackelträger Verlag, Hanover 1997, ISBN 3-7716-1601-8 .
• Cordula Tollmien: Jews in Göttingen: 1918 to 1933: Economic-cultural integration and increasing anti-Semitism (in it two sections on the socio-economic development and the personnel structure of the community by Matthias Manthey); 1933 to 1945: disenfranchisement, expulsion and murder; After 1945: organization of survival and the emergence of a new Jewish community . In: Rudolf von Thadden , Jürgen Trittel (Hrsg.): Göttingen - The history of a university town . tape 3 : From the Prussian medium-sized town to the large town in southern Lower Saxony from 1866 to 1989 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1999, ISBN 3-525-36198-X , p. 688-760 .
• Lisette Ferera, Cordula Tollmien: The Legacy of Max Raphael Hahn - Göttingen Citizen and Collector . A story of life and death, courageous perseverance and the continuing force of family tradition. Hogrefe, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8017-2679-9 .

Web links

Commons : Max Raphael Hahn  - Collection of Images

• The legacy of Max Raphael Hahn on tollmien.com

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Family treasures looted during Germany's Kristallnacht on display for the first time at Vancouver exhibition , accessed on November 11, 2019
2. ↑ Max Raphael Hahn (1880–1942) / Gertrud Hahn (1893–1941). Plaque. Article about Hahn on the website of Stadtarcvhiv Göttingen
3. ↑ Ines Lamprecht: A memorial plaque for Max Raphael and Gertrud Hahn . Blog of the Göttingen Municipal Museum, November 19, 2014.
4. ↑ Stumbling blocks for the Hahn family , accessed on November 11, 2019