Max Kniebel

Location 
John-Sieg-Straße 1 -3
Historical name
Tasdorfer Straße 71
District
Lichtenberg
Stone was laid
07 May 2004
Born
05 September 1886 in Schwersenz / Swarzędz
Occupation
Dekorateur und Plakatmaler
Deportation
on 28 October 1942 to Theresienstadt
Later deported
on 01 October 1944 to Auschwitz
Dead
in Auschwitz
Max Kniebel was born on 5 September 1886 in Schwersenz (now Swarzędz, Poland) in the district of Posen, the son of Hermann and Dorchen Kniebel. After the First World War, he and a large part of his family moved to Berlin. Here, he worked as a decorator and sign-painter and in 1923 became a shareholder of the Siegfried Scherk company, along with his older brother Siegfried. In 1931 they took over the entire business, a textiles agency with clients in Saxony and Württemberg, from the previous owner Mathilde Scherk. Max Kniebel lived with his brother at Prenzlauer Allee 18, now part of Karl-Liebknecht-Straße.
In 1937, aged 50, Max Kniebel married Recha Blond, who was from Posen like him and eighteen years' his junior. They lived at Hofmeisterstraße 1 (now Husemannstraße) in Prenzlauer Berg, but according to Recha Kniebel’s compensation file, were forced to move to an apartment at Tasdorfer Straße 71 in Lichtenberg the year after their marriage. Here, they lived as subtenants of Max Kniebel’s older sister Rosalie and her husband Max Aronsohn. Their unmarried sister Martha Kniebel also moved in here. Max Kniebel was made to pay 1,800 Reichmarks ‘Jewish property tax’ shortly before his company was forcibly closed in late 1938.
In view of the increasingly repressive measures against the Jewish population, the whole Kniebel family planned to emigrate to the United States, where Max Kiebel’s sister Bertha Fränkel already lived. But they only succeeded in obtaining the necessary papers for Max Kniebel’s 15-year-old nephew Hans. This was due to the U.S. quota system, limiting the entry of immigrants from each country of origin. Hans was the only one of the family to have been born in Berlin; the others fell under the Polish quota, which had long since been filled.
In April 1942, Max Kniebel’s sister Martha was deported to the Warsaw ghetto, where she died two days later, purportedly of pneumonia. Half a year later, on 28 October 1942, Max Kniebel and his wife were arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Theresienstadt. After almost two years in the ghetto, Max Kniebel became severely ill. On 1 October 1944 he was deported along with his wife to Auschwitz extermination camp and murdered.
Max Kniebel’s widow Recha survived the camps Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Mauthausen. After liberation, she lived for a time in Belgium before emigrating to the United States, where she died in the late 1970s. Siegfried Kniebel was also murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. His sister Rosalie took her own life shortly before she was due to be deported in March 1943.