Mile Braach

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Mile Braach , née Emilie Marie Auguste Hirschfeld (born March 3, 1898 in Frankfurt am Main ; † August 23, 1998 ibid), was a German chronicler and entrepreneur.

family

Emilie Hirschfeld was born as the first daughter of the Frankfurt leather manufacturer Otto Hirschfeld (1866–1952). Her younger sister Erna, later married Werkhäuser, was born in 1902 († 1995).

After elementary school, Emilie Hirschfeld attended Schiller School .

Emilie Hirschfeld married Johannes Heinrich Braach (1887–1940), a journalist, musicologist, director and later manager of the Mönchengladbach City Theater in 1920 . In 1921 their daughter Bergit , later married Forchhammer († 2011), was born.

Act

From 1927 Mile Braach wrote for various magazines. 1929, during the Great Depression , her husband was editor in chief of the village newspaper in Hildburghausen . For this reason the small family moved to Thuringia. In 1933, the year the National Socialists came to power , the family returned to Frankfurt am Main.

According to the Nuremberg Race Laws because of her Jewish father , Mile Braach was classified as a "first degree Jewish half-breed" . From 1935 the Reichsschrifttumskammer banned her from publishing. From 1935 to 1945 she worked instead as a branch manager of the Kalasiris corsetry store in Frankfurt's Kaiserstraße .

Her daughter Bergit worked in the late 1930s as a typist for Rudolf Schlosser in the small Frankfurt office of the Quakers in the high street . Between the night of the pogrom in 1938 and the start of the war, those seeking help and those wishing to leave the country lined up in the stairwell.

In 1939, 17-year-old Bergit Braach also emigrated to the United Kingdom . Emilie Braach's husband Johannes Heinrich Braach died in 1940.

Her parents were evicted from their apartment in September 1941, after which they moved into their daughter Emilie's apartment. Her father Otto Hirschfeld was registered there without the addition of "Israel" to the name prescribed by the Nazis for all male Jews. This was not noticed until March 1945, but then he received a written summons from the Gestapo . Emilie Braach immediately went looking for a hiding place and found it with a friend in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe . Everyone went into hiding there until the end of the war.

Four weeks after the end of the war, her daughter Bergit, who had come to Frankfurt am Main as an Allied Civilian Employee in the US Army because of her language skills, looked for and found her mother Emilie and her grandparents.

From 1946 to 1988 Mile Braach was co-owner of a leather goods wholesaler that she built up with her father, who was over eighty.

In 1987, her daughter Bergit Forchhammer published the letters that her mother had written for her in England during the Second World War . None of them had reached her then.

Now over 90 years old, Mile Braach began her writing work and processed her memories, including in an autobiographical story. In addition, she often gave literary lectures, visited the Frankfurt story-telling café and schools to answer questions there as a witness of the Third Reich .

She was buried in the Frankfurt main cemetery, Won J 727.

Works

  • Johann Wilhelm Abraham Jäger 1718–1790. A company history documentation . In: Archive for Frankfurt's History and Art AFGK 63 (1997), ISSN  0341-8324 , pp. 239–301
  • If my letters might reach you . Edited by Bergit Forchhammer (= Fischer Taschenbuch. 5658). Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-596-25658-5 .
  • Flashback. Memories of a 90-year-old (= Fischer Taschenbuch. 11346). Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-596-11346-6 .
  • Marie Eleonore Pfungst 1862–1943 (= Fritz Bauer Institute: Biographien. 1). Fritz Bauer Institute, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-932883-15-2 .
  • with Bergit Forchhammer: Far nearness (= Fischer Taschenbuch. 13741). Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-596-13741-1 .

Honors

literature

  • The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945. German Reich and Protectorate September 1939 - September 1941. Volume 3. Oldenbourg Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-486-58524-7 , pp. 86-88.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung No. 198 of August 27, 1998, p. 41
  2. ^ Institute for Urban History Frankfurt am Main, inventory name: Braach, Emilie, signature: S1-379
  3. ↑ The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945. German Reich and Protectorate September 1939 - September 1941. Volume 3, p. 86
  4. ↑ Mile Braach - Memories on: Dunkelgraefinhbn.de, accessed on August 2, 2015
  5. ↑ The Unknown Savior . In: Frankfurter Neue Presse of March 19, 2015 at: fnp.de, accessed on August 2, 2015
  6. ↑ Home but not home - Three wild years in post-war Germany at par.frankfurt.de , the former website of the City of Frankfurt am Main, accessed on August 2, 2015
  7. ↑ The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945. German Reich and Protectorate September 1939 - September 1941. Volume 3, p. 87
  8. ↑ Graves of important women ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Main cemetery Frankfurt am Main @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.frankfurter-hauptfriedhof.de
personal data
SURNAME Braach, Mile
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hirschfeld, Emilie Marie Auguste (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chronicler and entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH March 3, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH August 23, 1998
Place of death Frankfurt am Main