Norbert Wollheim

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Norbert Wollheim (born April 26, 1913 in Berlin ; † November 1, 1998 in New York ) was an auditor, tax advisor, former member of the board of directors of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and a functionary of Jewish organizations. His lawsuit against IG Farben for compensation for forced labor, filed in 1950, was the first test case in post-war Germany, although not the first by a former forced laborer.

Life

Norbert Wollheim grew up in Berlin. He began to study law and economics , which he had to abandon in 1933 because of his Jewish faith. He then worked in an export company in the metal industry and trained as a welder before the outbreak of the war in 1938 .

Wollheim was heavily involved in Jewish life and became managing director of the Association of German-Jewish Youth . After the November pogroms in 1938 , he helped organize the children's transports for the Jewish community to Great Britain and Sweden. Until 1941 he was responsible for the vocational schools of the Reich Representation of Jews in Germany and, as a consultant, was responsible for the manual training of the Jewish citizens who had been driven out of their professions.

From September 1941 on, Wollheim worked for a transport equipment factory in Berlin-Lichtenberg that was considered to be an important war operation .

On March 8, 1943, Wollheim was born with his wife Rosa, b. Mandelbrod (born 1912), his son Uriel Peter (born 1939) and his sister Ruth Wollheim (born 1910) were arrested and taken to the assembly camp for Jews on Grosse Hamburger Strasse in Berlin , which was under the supervision of the Gestapo . On March 12, 1943, he and his family were deported to Auschwitz . He was the only one in his family to survive the extermination camp.

He was taken to the Auschwitz III Monowitz camp, where he had to work as a slave laborer at IG Farben's Buna Plant IV and stayed there until the camp was evacuated on January 18, 1945. He managed to escape on a death march from the camp evacuated by the SS , which eventually led him to Lübeck , where he settled. He helped rebuild Jewish life in Germany after the war and became 2nd Chairman of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone and co-founder of the Jewish Trust Corporation in the British Zone. Later he was elected chairman of the Association of Jewish Communities in Northwest Germany (British Zone) and a member of the board of directors of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

End of September 1951 Wollheim immigrated to the United States to New York, where he is the public accountant , ie auditors continued formed. He worked as such until the mid-80s.

He has continued to volunteer with organizations such as the US Holocaust Council and the World Federation of Bergen-Belsen Survivors.

A few weeks before his death, Wollheim was still involved in the filming of the later Oscar-winning documentary Kindertransport - Into a Foreign World .

The Wollheim Trial

In 1950, Norbert Wollheim, represented by his lawyer Henry Ormond , brought the first model lawsuit by a former slave laborer against a German industrial company for damages, compensation for pain and suffering and wages.

The Wollheim lawsuit against IG Farbenindustrie AG iL was heard from 1950 to 1953 at the Frankfurt am Main regional court , with the defendant u. a. was represented by Alfred Seidl . Attorney Otto Küster made a much-noticed plea for the plaintiff . The regional court sentenced IG Farbenindustrie AG iL to pay Wollheim DM 10,000 in compensation for pain and suffering. The process was ended in the second instance before the Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt am Main in 1958 through a global settlement that provided for the payment of a total of DM 30 million to several thousand former forced laborers of IG Farbenindustrie AG.

Honor

Memorial on the Westend university campus

On November 2nd, 2008, a memorial designed by the artist Heiner Blum , the so-called Wollheim Memorial , was erected on the Westend campus of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main . The current main building of the university, designed by Hans Poelzig , was the central administration of IG Farben before 1945 . The former Grüneburgplatz in front of the main building of the university has been renamed Norbert-Wollheim-Platz. On February 4, 2015, the new street signs were installed. The university management did not want to take over their previous postal address Grüneburgplatz 1 as Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1, but chose the (specially relocated) Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 1.

literature

  • Norbert Wollheim: Belsen's Place in the Process of "Death-and-Rebirth" of the Jewish People. In: Irgun Sheerit Hapleita Me'haezor Habriti (ed.): Belsen. The Narod Press, London 1957, pp. 52-66
  • else: We have taken a stand. In: Richard Chaim Schneider (Ed.): We are there! The history of the Jews in Germany from 1945 to the present day. Ullstein, Berlin 2000, pp. 108-120
  • ders: Jewish self-government in the British zone. In: Michael Brenner (Ed.): After the Holocaust. Jews in Germany 1945–1950. Beck, Munich 1995, pp. 141-147
  • Ceremony for the inauguration of the Wollheim monument at the University of Frankfurt: [1] , [2]
  • Initiative to rename Grüneburgplatz to Norbert-Wollheim-Platz (Frankfurt): [3]
  • Wolfgang Benz : reparation in the Federal Republic of Germany. (= Series of the quarterly books for contemporary history special issue). R. Oldenbourg, Munich 1989, pp. 303-326
  • Joachim Robert Rumpf: The Wollheim case against IG Farbenindustrie AG in liquidation: the first sample lawsuit by a former forced laborer in the Federal Republic of Germany, trial, politics and the press. Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2010 ISBN 978-3-631-60131-0 ( online summary )
  • Wolfgang Benz : German Jews in the 20th Century. A story in portraits . CH Beck, Munich 2011 ISBN 978-3-406-62292-2 , pp. 145-183

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Source of 17 volumes of litigation materials Norbert Wollheim ./. IG Farben iL from the legacy of plaintiff Henry Ormond in the archive of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich (PDF file; 76 kB)
  2. ^ Journal Frankfurt
  3. ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) online edition from February 4, 2015
  4. ^ FAZ, print edition of February 5, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Wollheim, Norbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German tax advisor, member of the Central Council of Jews
DATE OF BIRTH April 26, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH November 1, 1998
Place of death New York City