Valentin Ernst Burchard

Valentin Ernst Burchard (born January 26, 1891 in Hamburg , † after 1941) was a German politician ( DDP , state party) who was murdered by the National Socialists because of his Jewry .

Life and work

Stumbling stone for Valentin Burchard in Papenhuder Straße 53 on the Uhlenhorst .

After graduating from high school in Eimsbüttel, Burchard, who was of Jewish faith, went through commercial training with various Hamburg export merchants. After acquiring the business assistant certificate , he joined the army of the German Empire in 1912 and completed the so-called one - year - old in Schwerin . Following his military service, he worked in Buenos Aires from 1913 . In 1915 he returned to Hamburg, volunteered for military service and was deployed as a non-commissioned officer on the Western Front.

After the end of the First World War , he first worked as a businessman in the Netherlands . In 1920 he returned to Hamburg and started his own trading company. The Chamber of Commerce elected him to their industrial commission, and he also worked as an honorary labor judge. In 1928 he became a member of the board of directors of Hugo Peters & Co. AG , which was active in the wine trade and spirits production. He later founded his own wine wholesaler on the Uhlenhorst .

Burchard was involved in the Weimar Republic in the DDP and from 1930 in its successor, the German State Party . In 1932/33 he belonged to the Hamburg parliament .

After the National Socialist " seizure of power " in 1933, he stayed in Hamburg. Although many friends from Group Q around Friedrich Ablass advised him to emigrate , this was initially out of the question for him. He considered National Socialism to be a temporary phenomenon and provided material support to many party friends who had lost their jobs for political reasons. For example, the former country manager of the DDP, Martin Plat, reports that Burchard had a butcher deliver a roast to him every Saturday for a long time.

When the sales of the wine wholesalers declined due to the National Socialist repression, he founded a company in 1935 with Valentin Burchard & Co. that manufactured pharmaceutical preparations for export. It was not until January 1939 that he tried to emigrate. As a result, his company was " Aryanized " on February 16, 1939 and taken over by the Hamburg Chisinolfabrik. Although Burchard had received all the certificates and documents for the emigration for himself and his family in July 1939, the emigration ultimately failed because Burchard was unable to obtain the equivalent of £ 410 for a life insurance policy that existed in Great Britain, which he bought back Wanted to pay for emigration to be delivered to the foreign exchange office in good time before the start of the war . His liquidity was no longer sufficient for this due to the numerous compulsory levies and the expropriation of his company.

Burchard was married and had four children. While his youngest son came to England on a Kindertransport in July 1939 and survived there, his oldest son died in 1939 at the age of only 18. Burchard, his wife and their two daughters were on 8 November 1941 in the Minsk ghetto deported where their trail is lost. The last sign of life is a letter from the beginning of 1942 to Max Plaut , the head of the Jewish religious association in Hamburg.

Stumbling blocks were laid for Burchard, his wife and his two daughters at Papenhuder Strasse 53 on Uhlenhorst, where he lived and ran his wine shop . On June 8, 2012, stumbling blocks were laid in front of Hamburg City Hall for the murdered members of the Hamburg Parliament, including another for Valentin Ernst Burchard. In 2018 a third stone was laid in front of the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce .

literature

• Ernst Valentin Burchard, Olga Burchard, Gabriele Olga Burchard, Marianne Lilly Burchard. In: Carmen Smiatacz: Stolpersteine ​​in Hamburg-Barmbek and Hamburg-Uhlenhorst. Biographical search for traces. State Center for Civic Education , Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-929728-53-8 , pp. 81–83.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Christof Brauers: The FDP in Hamburg 1945 to 1953. Start as a bourgeois left party , Martin Meidenbauer Verlagbuchhandlung, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-89975-569-5 , p. 110.
2. ↑ stumbling blocks for DEFINITIVE murdered MdHB inscriptions Rathaus Hamburg. to: stolpersteine-hamburg.de (PDF; 16 kB)