Else Lehmann née Joel

Else (Elsbeth) Lehmann was born Else Joel on 11 February 1872. She married Richard Lehmann, a wool factory director and owner of the “Elysium” theatre-cinema. In 1935, after their villa in Niederschöneweide was expropriated, they moved into a house at Falterweg 13 in the Eichkamp estate. Both were native Berliners and unaffiliated with any religion, but “non-Aryan” in Nazi jargon. Their daughter Edith was able to flee to London. The Lehmanns had to leave their home, probably after it was sold in 1939, and lived for a time in Lankwitz before registering as resident in the Jewish hospital at Iranische Strasse 2 in Wedding. They had to give much of their property to the tax office as “atonement tax”.

Else and Richard Lehmann were both deported to Theresienstadt on the “85th transport of the elderly” on 2 February 1943. Richard Lehmann died four months later, aged 79, on 4 June 1943. Elsbeth Lehmann was deported from there to Auschwitz where she was murdered, aged 72.

The house at Falterweg 13 had belonged to a lawyer, Louis (Ludwig) Hayn and his wife Meta, before the Lehmanns moved in. In 1933, Louis and Meta Hayn, both in their early fifties, and their almost 10-year-old son, Rolf, left the country, embarking on an odyssey that took them via Paris and Barcelona to the United States. In 1939 the house and grounds were registered by the then-conventional phrase as having changed hands in an “emergency sale”.