Wilhelm Croner

Wilhelm Croner was born on 26 April 1869 in Berlin. His parents were Simon Croner, a merchant, and his wife Rosalie, née Dann. Wilhelm grew up with at least two siblings: His older brother Max Croner was born in 1866 in Berlin; his younger brother Leopold was born in 1871. Few records have survived of Wilhelm Croner’s home life, childhood, and youth. But it is most likely that his parents belonged to Berlin’s Jewish Community. After primary school, Wilhelm attended the Friedrichs-Realgymnasium secondary school at Albrechtstraße 27 in Mitte (now the Leibniz-Gymnasium in Kreuzberg, to tenth grade equivalent, gaining his secondary school certificate. He then started a commercial apprenticeship at the Philipp Cosack stamp dealer’s at Burgstraße 8, which specialized in large collections, but later turned his interest to the wholesale and retail cigar trade. Around the turn of the century, he opened a cigar shop at Poststraße 29 in the Nikolaiviertel district, which moved to Poststraße 31 in 1917.

On 8 February 1907, Wilhelm Croner married Margarete Heymann, the daughter of Bentheim Heymann (1847–1930) and his wife Ernestine, née Cohn (1854–1890), born in 1881 in Posen (now Poznań) and twelve years his junior. The newly-weds took an apartment at Neue Grünstraße 13 in Mitte, near Spittelmarkt. Two years after their marriage, in February 1909, their daughter Gertrude was born. In 1910/1911 the family moved to Skalitzer Straße 50 in Kreuzberg and finally in 1914 to a 5-room apartment at Burgstraße 3.

Looking back on her childhood and youth, Gertrude Croner later stated: “My father’s business was very prosperous. He employed an accountant with powers of attorney, a salesman, a warehouseman and city representatives. He was able to keep the family very comfortable. […] From early childhood on I went on trips abroad with my parents. First, I had a French governess, then an English governess, and I received a good education at a high school for girls (Städtisches Luisen-Lyzeum mit Oberlyzeum, Ziegelstr.) and then a social workers’ seminary. My father wanted to enable me to study national economics at university, but these plans were frustrated by the Hitler period.” In 1927/1928 Wilhelm Croner opened another cigar shop in Königstraße (now Rathausstraße) close to Nathan Israel department store.

The mechanisms gradually introduced from 1933 on to persecute Jews – or all those considered to be Jews under the Nazi state’s Nuremberg Laws – soon hit Wilhelm Croner and his family. They included numerous measures designed to discriminate against and exclude Jews from society, to deprive them of their civil rights and oust them from the nation’s business and economic life. As a business owner, Wilhelm Croner was directly impacted by the anti-Semitic campaigns, boycotts, and riots after 1933 that came to a visible head in the pogroms of June and November 1938. Wilhelm’s daughter later described their situation under the increasing persecution: “The Gestapo harassment started in 1933/1934 and soon afterwards – it must have been 1935 – my father’s business was closed after he was slandered by one of his employees. The Gestapo confiscated everything. My father suffered a punctured lung due to the stress.” The Berlin directories show that Wilhelm Croner gave up his shop on Königstraße in 1933 and the branch at Poststraße 31 in 1935. One year previously, Wilhelm and his wife had moved out of the apartment on Burgstraße that had been their home for many years and into one at Wallnertheaterstraße 10. In 1936 and 1937 Wilhelm Croner tried one more time to run a cigar shop at Köllnischer Fischmarkt 1 (now Leipzigerstraße/Mühlendamm) in Mitte before finally giving up – probably after the pogroms in 1938 – and moving with his wife to Stralauer Straße 3–6, where they lived on their savings. By the early 1940s the Croners’ life in Berlin had become a struggle to survive. A police decree of 1 September 1941 “concerning the identification of Jews” was just one of many measures that had drastic repercussions. It meant they could not leave their home without wearing the “yellow star” branding them Jews.

Having been stripped of their rights, they faced deportation: On 1 October 1941 the Gestapo informed the Berlin Jewish Community of the imminent “resettlement” of Berlin’s Jews. Margarete and Wilhelm Croner were forced to leave their apartment in early 1942 and were interned in one of the assembly camps in Berlin. From there they were deported on 13 January 1942 with the “8th transport to the east” to the Riga ghetto. As both Margarete and Wilhelm Croner were labelled “able to work” in the deportation list, it is likely they were made to perform forced labour in the ghetto – or in a nearby work crew – before being either directly or indirectly murdered by deliberate malnourishment and physical abuse. In any case they were not among the few German Jews deported to Riga who survived.

Their daughter Gertrude Croner managed to escape to England in May 1937 with her later husband Bernhard Holländer. They married in December 1937, survived the Nazi regime in exile in Ireland and later emigrated to Israel. Wilhelm’s brother Max Croner died in 1926 in Berlin. His brother Leopold Croner escaped Nazi Germany with his wife in 1937 and lived in exile in the United States.

Compiler’s note: All the lines quoted are taken from the compensation file on Wilhelm Croner, listed below (held in the Landesamt für Bürger- und Ordnungsangelegenheiten Berlin Abt. I).