Paul Levy (Railway Engineer)

Paul Joseph Levy (born November 17, 1876 in Stettin , died February 27, 1943 in Auschwitz concentration camp ) was a German mechanical engineer and railroad worker . After studying engineering, he joined the Prussian State Railways. From 1905 until shortly before the First World War , he took on tasks with the Hejaz Railway and in German East Africa . After the World War he entered the service of the Deutsche Reichsbahn . From 1933 he was discriminated against as a Jew and was finally released in 1935. In 1943 Levy was deported to Auschwitz and murdered there.

Life

Levy was born in Stettin in 1876 as the second son of the grain dealer Julius Levy (1846–1920) and his wife Therese, née Riess (1850–1901). Grandfather Ascher Levy came from Bad Polzin , where he owned a sawmill and a timber wholesaler. Paul Levy's older brother by a year was the painter Rudolf Levy . Paul and Rudolf Levy were still small children when the family moved to Langgasse in Danzig . Sister Käthe was born there in 1879. The assimilated parents raised the children in the Jewish faith .

Hejaz Railway Station in Damascus

After graduating from high school, Levy studied railway mechanical engineering, he passed the main examination in 1899. It is no longer known exactly where he studied, probably at the Technical University of Charlottenburg , which was then considered one of the best training facilities for mechanical engineers worldwide. After graduating, he joined the Prussian State Railways as a government building supervisor for training . He completed this legal traineeship in 1903 with the master builder examination. In 1905 Levy took a leave of absence from the Prussian railway administration and entered the service of the Hejaz Railway under its German chief engineer Meißner Pascha . In the construction and operations management, Levy was responsible for the construction, procurement and repair of the rolling stock as well as the necessary railway depot and the establishment of the workshop in Damascus . In 1906 Levy was stationed in Darʿā , an operating center of the railway, where the important branch line to the Mediterranean port of Haifa branched off. That year he married his cousin Ida Levy in Bad Polzin. The marriage had traditionally been arranged by the two fathers as a shidduch . After the marriage, the couple first lived in Constantinople , then in Damascus and finally in Beirut .

The contract with the Hejaz Railway ended in 1909. Levy then went to German East Africa, today's Tanzania , for about a year , where he was probably employed by the East African Railway Company (OAEG) that built the Tanganyika Railway there . The Levy couple returned to Germany in 1910. From October 1910, he worked as an "unskilled worker" at the machine office in Saarbrücken . During this time he published his experiences in the operation of the Hejaz Railway in a larger technical article in the organ for the progress of the railway , the official journal of the Association of German Railway Administrations . In 1912 he took over the management of the repair shop in Cologne-Nippes . In that year he became a father, on September 12th his wife gave birth to their daughter Susanne. During the First World War, Levy remained stationed in Cologne, but was temporarily used in the front railroad service on the Eastern Front. He was injured in the leg during an operation and received the Iron Cross , it is not known which class. The Levy couple had become increasingly estranged and separated in 1917. Ida Levy went with her daughter to her family in Bad Polzin. The marriage was only divorced in 1923, after the death of her parents.

With the founding of the Deutsche Reichsbahn in 1920 Levy changed to their service, from October 1920 in the rank of senior government and building councilor. After the establishment of the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft, the official title changed to Reichsbahnoberrat. In 1925 he moved to the Reichsbahndirektion Altona , where he was responsible for the workshop operations as a department head under Ernst Spiro and was involved, among other things, with the rationalization of workshop operations and the introduction of flow production . During this time Levy married again, his second wife Charlotte, née Lewy, came from Berlin . The couple were members of the High German Israelite Congregation in Altona . In 1929 Ernst Spiro moved to Berlin as director of the Reichsbahn Central Office for Purchasing and Levy succeeded him in the position of head of department for the entire workshop department, initially provisionally, and formally from December 1930. Before that, Julius Dorpmüller, General Director of the Reichsbahn, had promoted him to Director of the Reichsbahn on October 1, 1930.

After the seizure of power of the Nazis General Dorpmüller sought quickly to close ranks with the new rulers. The law on civil servants passed in April was also introduced at the Reichsbahn, which is organized under private law. As a participant in the World War, Levy initially retained his position as a civil servant thanks to the combatant privilege . However, in November 1933 he was transferred to the Reichsbahndirektion Elberfeld , downgraded to head of department. Despite his requests, he could no longer help his cousin in Bad Polzin, whose sawmill was suffering from the loss of orders from the Stettin Reich Railway Directorate and other harassment. In the spring of 1935 Levy was listed among the 19 mechanical engineering directors of the Reichsbahn in the directory of the upper Reichsbahn officials. After the Nuremberg Laws were passed , however, he and the remaining “non-Aryans” were dismissed at the end of 1935. After their release, the couple moved to Berlin, where family members already lived. The pension he was entitled to was reduced several times in the following years.

From 1938 onwards, the couple tried to emigrate after Paul Levy's cousin Leo Levy was shot by SA men in Bad Polzin during the November pogroms in 1938 . His daughter Susanne emigrated in 1939 because the Nuremberg Laws did not permit the intended marriage to her “German-blooded” husband. After getting married in London , they both moved to Chile . Paul Levy and his wife tried several times in the following years, albeit unsuccessfully, to obtain a visa for Chile and other South American countries, most recently in October 1941. After the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler prohibited the emigration of Jews in October 1941, the corresponding efforts were futile become. In 1942 the couple lost their own apartment in the Berlin-Zehlendorf district and had to move into a "Jewish apartment" in Berlin-Wilmersdorf as a subtenant . In February 1943, the couple received the order to move to the Große Hamburger Straße assembly camp . From there they were taken to the Moabit freight yard on February 26, 1943 , and taken to Auschwitz on a Reichsbahn transport train. The train reached the Auschwitz extermination camp the next day, where Paul and Charlotte Levy were classified as “not fit for work” in the selection process on the same day and were murdered in the gas chambers immediately afterwards . While Paul Levy's sister Käthe and her family were able to emigrate to Palestine in 1937 and his first wife Ida to Switzerland in 1938, his brother Rudolf also died in Auschwitz in 1944.

Commemoration

Stumbling block for Paul Levy

Stumbling block for Charlotte Levy

In his book Ascher Levys Sehnsucht nach Deutschland , published in German in 1999 , Roman Frister recalled the fate of Paul Levy and his family. Since October 2012, two stumbling blocks in Berlin-Zehlendorf in front of their last voluntarily chosen apartment have been remembering Paul Levy and his second wife. In 2013, the German Museum of Technology in Berlin presented a special exhibition on German-Jewish engineers, inventors and photographers, including Paul Levy and his life.

Publications

• Equipment of the Hedjazbahn. In: Organ for the progress of the railway system 48 (1911), pp. 82–86 and pp. 99–101.
• Flow work and flowing production in railway repair shops. In: Verkehrstechnik 8/1927, p. 55.

literature

• Alfred Gottwaldt : Railroad workers abroad. Memory of Paul Levy, the Hejaz Railway and the Reichsbahn. In: Eisenbahngeschichte 54, 10/2012, pp. 70–72.
• Alfred Gottwaldt: Paul Levy: Engineer of the Hejaz Railway and the Reichsbahn (= Jewish miniatures. Volume 155). Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin 2014. ISBN 978-3-95565-065-0 .

Web links

• Biography of Paul Levy for the Stolpersteine ​​project

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Alfred Gottwaldt: Wagner's standard locomotives. The steam locomotives of the Reichsbahn and their creators . EK-Verlag, Freiburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-88255-738-1 .