Paul Eppstein

Stumbling blocks in Mannheim

Stolperstein , Ludwigkirchstrasse 10a, in Berlin-Wilmersdorf

Paul Maximilian Eppstein (born March 4, 1902 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein ; died September 27 or 28 , 1944 in the Small Fortress Theresienstadt ) was a German sociologist and elder of Jews in the Theresienstadt ghetto .

Life

Paul Maximilian Eppstein was the son of the traveling salesman Isidor Eppstein (1869–1916) and his wife Johanna, geb. Scharff (* 1874). He spent his early childhood in Ludwigshafen am Rhein before the family moved to Mannheim in 1908. His brother Lothar was born in 1909 († 1977 in the USA). After the death of their father, the family moved back to Ludwigshafen in 1918. In 1920 he made his Abitur at the secondary school in Mannheim , then he studied law and political science, sociology and economics at the University of Heidelberg . He received his doctorate in 1924 from the philosophical faculty. Subject of his dissertation : The average as statistical fiction .

In 1928 he became head of the Mannheim Adult Education Center, which in a few years developed into one of the most important institutes of its kind in Germany. On August 14, 1930 in Ludwigshafen, he married Dr. Hedwig Strauss (* 1903). In the 1930s, Eppstein taught sociology at the College for the Science of Judaism in Berlin . In 1933 he published the paperback The Symptomatics in Business Cycle Research .

In the same year he had to resign from the leadership of the adult education center. At the request of the board of directors of the Reich Representation of German Jews in Berlin, he joined the latter, where he was mainly concerned with administrative and social issues. After the November pogroms , Eppstein received an invitation from England to give lectures in sociology, which he turned down because he did not want to leave Germany. In the following time he was arrested several times by the Gestapo .

From July 1939 he was active in the Reich Association of Jews in Germany and had to appear several times in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in the so-called Eichmannreferat . In the late summer of 1941, as a representative of the Reich Association, together with Josef Löwenherz from the Kultusgemeinde Vienna , Adolf Eichmann in the presence of Rolf Günther and Friedrich Suhr informed him that mandatory labeling would be introduced for all Jews in the Reich in September 1941. From September 19, the so-called Star of David had to be worn by anyone who was legally considered a Jew.

In January 1943 he was deported together with his wife and Leo Baeck to the Theresienstadt ghetto , where he was named Jewish elder as the successor to Jakob Edelstein . As such he was forced, among other things, to help prepare deportations to the extermination camps . On September 27 or 28, 1944, he was shot by SS men in the Small Fortress Theresienstadt . His wife Hedwig was deported to Auschwitz on October 28, 1944 , where she was also murdered.

literature

• John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , col. 187.
• Karl Otto Watzinger : History of the Jews in Mannheim 1650-1945. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-17-008696-0 , pp. 89-92.
• Israel Gutman (ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust - The persecution and murder of European Jews. 3 volumes, Piper Verlag, Munich / Zurich 1998, ISBN 3-492-22700-7 .
• Beate Meyer: Deadly tightrope walk - The Reich Association of Jews in Germany between hope, coercion, self-assertion and entanglement (1939–1945). Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8353-0933-3 .
• Wolfgang Benz : German Jews in the 20th Century: A History in Portraits . Munich: Beck, 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-62292-2 , therein: “Judenältester” in Theresienstadt: Paul Eppstein , pp. 65–77
• Claus-Dieter Krohn: Eppstein, Paul. In: Harald Hagemann , Claus-Dieter Krohn (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking economic emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Adler – Lehmann. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11284-X , pp. 142-143.
• Eppstein, Paul , in: Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945 . Munich: Saur, 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 81f.
• Eppstein, Hedwig , in: Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945 . Munich: Saur, 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 81

Web links

Commons : Paul Eppstein  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Eppstein, Dr. Paul. In: www.ghetto-theresienstadt.info, Theresienstadt 1941–1945. A reference work.
• Documents on Paul Eppstein in the collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Esriel Hildesheimer: Jewish self-government under the Nazi regime. Mohr Siebeck, 1994, ISBN 9783161461798 , p. 204.