Dr. Karl Eisemann

Location 
Dortmunder Straße 13
District
Moabit
Stone was laid
20 September 2013
Born
04 June 1895 in Westheim
Deportation
on 26 October 1942 to Riga
Murdered
29 October 1942 in Riga

Karl Eisemann was born on 4 June 1895 in Westheim near Hammelburg, Bavaria. His parents were Salomon Eisemann (1853–1930), a religion teacher and primary school principal, and his wife Bertha, née Grünbaum (1861–1936). He grew up with two siblings: His older brother Lazarus was born in 1891 in Westheim; his younger sister Lina (Leah) Eisemann was born in 1901. In 1912 the family moved to Würzburg, where Karl attended the city’s grammar school and, after gaining his school-leaving diploma, enrolled to study – like his father before him – at the Israelite Teachers’ College (ILBA).

After passing his examinations in 1914 Karl Eisemann started teaching at the Jewish primary school in Würzburg. On 1 September 1917 he joined the Bavarian army and served in the reserve battalion of the 9th Royal Bavarian Infantry Regiment Wrede during the First World War. From 15 October to 31 December 1917, he was exempted from service to work in school. His brother Lazarus, who had studied medicine at the Julius Maximilian University in Würzburg, served in the military medical service during the First World War. He gained his doctorate in 1919 in Würzburg und started working as a doctor in 1920 in Nürnberg, where he opened a practice. In 1918 Karl Eisemann passed his state teaching examination and after demobilization resumed his work as a teacher at the Jewish primary school in Würzburg. In 1919 he was elected secretary of the association of young Jewish teachers in Bavaria (Arbeitsgemeinschaft jüdischer Junglehrer Bayerns). In 1921, he enrolled as a post-graduate student in Berlin and gained his doctorate in the mid-1920s at the Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelm University in Bonn. In the same year he started teaching at the Adass Jisroel Jewish Community primary school in Berlin, which relocated to studio premises at Siegmunds Hof 11 in the Hansaviertel district in the early 1930s. Karl Eisemann lived in an apartment at Niebuhrstraße 6 in Charlottenburg at the time. On 1 October 1936 he married Else Katz, a teacher, in Eschwege, and moved with her into an apartment at Dortmunder Straße 13 in Moabit. On 27 December 1937 their daughter was born, whom they named Noemi.

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 Karl Eisemann 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. Under the Nazis’ “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” of 7 April 1933 Karl Eisemann was prohibited from teaching at state schools. A decree of 1935 aimed to ensure “as complete racial segregation as possible” in schools and after the pogroms of November 1938, Jewish children were strictly banned from attending state schools. Private schools, such as the primary school at which Karl Eisemann taught, now served increasingly as shelters against anti-Semitic attacks and to prepare the students for emigration and life abroad.   

Emigration and escape from Germany were also crucial issues affecting Karl Eisemann’s immediate family: His brother Lazarus fled with his wife Lina, née Bacharach, and his children Kurt (*1923) and Edith (*1925) as early as summer 1933 to France, where they lived in Lyon for a time. In 1935 they emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine. Karl’s sister Lina had married Dr. Max Birk, a veterinarian, in 1928 and emigrated with him and their two children Walter (*1930) and Mirjam (*1936) to Palestine in 1936. In the late 1930s/early 1940s Karl and Else Eisemann also tried to leave the country. Among the documents in the family compensation file are two letters from Karl Eisemann to relatives, probably from the late 1930s or early 1940s, which show how far advanced the Eisemanns’ plans to emigrate had been. They had hired forwarding agents, paid emigration tax and “Dego” duty (levied by the Nazi state on credit transferrals abroad) and consigned some of their movable goods to liftvans (transport crates for shipping overseas). They hoped to leave for the British Mandate territory of Palestine. But in October 1939 an entry ban came into force in Palestine. Karl Eisemann was presumably referring to this when he wrote: “The news of the ban struck us like a thunderbolt and left us utterly consternated. So, we would be all the happier if it would nevertheless work out.” They were evidently considering entry via Syria as Karl Eisemann continued: “Couldn’t we, if available, take a ticket directly to Haifa when travelling to Syria? [...] You don’t know badly we are longing for some news; it’s like sitting on a powder keg.”

The Eisemanns were also preparing for making a living in exile. Karl Eisemann asked whether the letter’s recipient could contact the boarding school in Pardes Hanna near Haifa: “Perhaps you could put your feelers out concerning the possibility of music lessons or even general instruction, even if it’s only a few lessons. I don’t really think I’ll be able to continue working in my profession as there are already too many in the country waiting for employment. Else is now learning to sew brassieres and plans to either earn money by sewing or to get a job straightaway as a household help. We don’t want to be a burden on anybody […].” But the Eisemanns’ hopes to emigrate were finally shattered by the Nazi regime’s ban on emigration of October 1941.

In the late 1930s Karl and Else Eisemann had taken in Karl’s parents-in-law Simon and Nanny (Nannchen) Katz, née Heß, in their apartment at Dortmunder Straße 13. Simon Katz had been interned in Buchenwald concentration camp (prisoner number 30275) in late 1938 and after his release had fled Berlin to Eschwege. Until 1937/1938 Karl Eisemann had been a teacher at the Adass Jisroel Jewish Community primary school, which was closed in 1939. In 1938/1939 he was principal of the Rykestraße Jewish Community primary school. When the last remaining Jewish schools closed in spring 1941, Karl Eisemann finally became unemployed. He was made to work as a labourer digging graves for the Jewish Community cemetery administration. His wife was made to perform forced labour in the early 1940s for Martin Michalski Uniformbetrieb uniform makers, based at Große Frankfurter Straße 137.

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. Karl Eisemann was arrested during the Nazis’ “Gemeindeaktion” aiming to deport Berlin’s Jewish Community staff, in October 1942 and interned in the assembly camp in the former synagogue in Levetzowstraße. He was deported a few days later with his wife and 4-year-old daughter.

A neighbour of the Eisemanns later wrote to Else’s brother Max Katz about what happened: “First Dr. Eisemann was taken away by the Gestapo, that was on Friday, and on Monday Else went voluntarily to join her husband and their child was picked up by Jewish helpers a few hours later because she was still sleeping. That was on 26 October 1942. – It was terrible! I would have written a long time ago, but I didn’t want to think about all the terrible times. […]. Your brother-in-law was a lovely man, a gentleman from head to toe. And your dear sister Else was such an affectionate, kind, and good woman, a rare kind […].”

Karl, Else and Noemi Eisemann were deported on 26 October 1942 with the “22nd transport to the east” from Berlin to the Riga ghetto. Karl Eisemann, then aged 47, and his 34-year-old wife were labelled “able to work” in the deportation list. It is likely they were selected to perform forced labour in Riga before they were murdered in the ghetto, in a work crew, or in one of the Nazis’ extermination camps. In any case, neither Karl, nor Else, nor Noemi Eisemann were among the few survivors of the Riga ghetto.

Else Eisemann’s parents, who were officially subtenants of their daughter and son-in-law, initially stayed in the apartment at Dortmunder Straße 13 after their daughter’s deportation. They were arrested in spring 1943, during the Nazis’ “factory campaign” to deport the last Jews officially remaining in the capital, and deported separately, on 3 and 4 March 1943, to Auschwitz extermination camp, where they were murdered. Karl’s brother and sister survived the Nazi regime with their families in exile. Else’s brother Max Katz managed to escape with his wife and daughter in early August 1939 to Brazil before emigrating to the United States in 1940. He survived the Nazi regime in the United States.

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