Georg Feige

Georg Mannes Feige was born on 2 October 1877 in Rawitsch, a district capital in southwest Posen (now Rawicz in Poland), to Michaelis Feige, a factory owner, and his wife Ernestine, née Kaelter. who ran a cotton wool factory in Rawitsch. Georg grew up with three siblings: his brothers Julius and Hermann, born in 1879 and 1884 in Rawitsch, and his sister Gertrude, born in 1880. Unfortunately, no further records of Georg’s family home, childhood and youth in imperial Rawitsch have survived. But it is most likely that his parents belonged to the local Jewish Community, which counted some 1200 of the town’s 11000 residents around the time of Georg’s birth.

After completing his schooling, Georg Feige attended a teacher training college for elementary school teachers. Around the turn of the century, he was working as a teacher and school inspector in Cologne. In October 1906 he married Margarete Israelzik, a pianist and music teacher four years his junior, in Berlin. Margarete was a native of Berlin and the daughter of Abraham Israelzik, a typesetter, and his wife Erna Amalie, née Olschki. On 22 September 1909, Margarete’s and Georg’s son Heinz Feige was born in Darmstadt. One year later, their daughter Hilda Feige was born. After the outbreak of World War 1, the family moved to Berlin. From around 1915/16 on, they lived in the district of Moabit. Georg Feige is first listed in the Berlin directory of 1916 as a middle school teacher resident at Spenerstraße 19. The family’s home was right on the riverbank, across the Spree from Bellevue Palace. In 1923 the Feige family moved to Spenerstraße 20. Georg’s father, Michaelis Feige, had died in Rawitsch in 1915. Georg’s widowed mother last lived in Breslau (Wrocław), where Georg’s sister Gertrude lived with her first husband and where Georg’s brother Hermann Feige had also lived until his premature death in 1906. Georg’s second brother Julius Feige last lived with his wife Ernestine, née Hartoch, in Düsseldorf. Unfortunately, no records have survived to tell of the family’s life during the Weimar Republic.

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 Georg Feige 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. While Berlin had seen anti-Semitic riots during the Weimar Republic, by the early 1930s, open violence had massively increased, with street fights, assembly hall brawls, and SA marches becoming regular occurrences. The Nazi state ensured that racism became institutionalized, issuing various decrees and special laws that increasingly stripped the Jewish population, including the Feige family, of their rights.

Georg Feige taught at the Jewish Community middle school (now Jüdisches Gymnasium Moses Mendelssohn) at Große Hamburger Straße 27. Under the Nazis’ “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” of 7 April 1933 he would no longer have had the option of teaching at a state school. From then on, not only Jewish teachers were increasingly barred from state schools but also Jewish students. With each tighter restriction, Jewish schools gained another influx of students:  In 1935 a decree was issued, aiming to ensure “as complete racial segregation as possible” in schools; after the pogroms of November 1938, Jewish children were strictly prohibited from attending state schools. Schools such as the Jewish Community middle school at which Georg Feige taught now served also as shelters against anti-Semitic attacks. Another function they assumed by adapting their curriculum, especially after 1938, was to prepare students for emigration and life abroad. It is not known whether Georg and Margarete Feige made any plans to leave Germany. If they did, they came to nothing. Their son Heinz Feige managed to escape with his wife Susi Rosalia, née Urbach, via Antwerpen to the United States in 1939. Their daughter Hilda Feige, later divorcée DiRocco, and remarried Sabatini, also survived the Nazi regime in exile in the United States.       

In 1936 Georg and Margarete Feige moved into a new apartment at Bundesratsufer 12 in Moabit. In the late 1930s, Georg Feige assumed directorial duties in the school, becoming vice principal and deputy head of the Jewish Community middle school and eventually its last principal after Heinemann Stern (1878–1957), who held the post until 1938. By the early 1940s, the Feige’s 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. In 1942 the Reich Main Security Office ordered the Jewish Community to vacate the property at Große Hamburger Straße 27 by 15 April that year. After the school’s closure, the premises were used for some months as an assembly camp for deportees from Berlin. In June 1942 Georg and Margarete Feige moved into an apartment at Flotowstraße 10. Georg Feige was employed here for some weeks as an ‘investigator’ with the Jewish cultural association Jüdische Kultusvereinigung zu Berlin.

Having been stripped of their rights, Georg and Margarete Feige faced deportation: On 1 October 1941 the Gestapo informed the Berlin Jewish Community of the imminent “resettlement” of Berlin’s Jews. Georg and Margarete Feige received a deportation notice in autumn 1942. They were interned in the assembly camp in the former Jewish Community old people’s home at Große Hamburger Straße 26. From there they were deported with the “72nd transport of the elderly” on 5 November 1942 to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Georg Feige endured the inhumane conditions in Theresienstadt for roughly half a year before being directly or indirectly murdered, aged 65, on 14 May 1943 – by deliberate malnourishment, the withholding of medication, exposure to cold and physical abuse. Margarete Feige was deported from Theresienstadt on 16 May 1944, aged 62, to Auschwitz extermination camp and murdered there.

Georg’s children survived the Nazi regime in exile in the United States. His brother Julius Feige was deported with his wife on 10 November 1941 from Düsseldorf to the Minsk ghetto. Neither survived Nazi persecution. Georg’s sister Gertrude Feige, mariée Goldstein, was deported to Theresienstadt on 27 July 1942 and from there, on 23 September 1942, to Treblinka extermination camp, where she was murdered.