Margarete Croner née Heymann

Location 
Burgstraße 3
District
Mitte
Stone was laid
20 September 2013
Born
30 March 1881 in Posen/ Poznan
Deportation
on 13 January 1942 to Riga
Murdered
in Riga

Margarete Heymann was born on 30 March 1881 in Posen an der Warthe (now Poznań). Her parents were the local grocer Bentheim Heymann and his wife Ernestine, née Cohn. Margarete’s older brother Hermann was born in 1876 in Berlin. No records have survived of the home life, childhood, and youth of Margarete and her brother in Posen. But it is most likely that their parents belonged to the town’s Jewish Community, which counted some 7,000 of the town’s approximately 66,000 inhabitants around the time of Margarete’s birth. In May 1890, when Margarete was nine, her mother died. In the 1890s, her widowed father moved with her and her brother to Berlin, where they lived in an apartment at Skalitzer Straße 53. It is not known whether Margarete completed any vocational training. Her brother traded in textiles in the capital. In 1907 Margarete married Wilhelm Croner, a merchant ten years her senior. Around the turn of the century, he had a cigar shop at Poststraße 29 in the Nikolaiviertel district, which he later relocated to Poststraße 31. 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 and in 1910/1911 the family moved to Skalitzer Straße 50 in Kreuzberg before finally moving in 1914 to a 5-room apartment at Burgstraße 3.

Looking back on her childhood and youth, the Croners’ daughter Gertrude 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. In March 1930, Margarete’s father died, aged 82, in Berlin.

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 Margarete Croner and her 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 business owners, the Croners were 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. Margarete’s daughter later described their situation under the increasing persecution: “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, Margarete and her husband 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 couple’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.

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. Margarete’s brother Hermann Heymann also managed to flee Nazi persecution to England with his wife Meta, née Mehsow, before 1939 and survived.

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).