Charlotte Kirchberger née Kirchberger

Charlotte Kirchberger (née Kirchberger) was born on June 24, 1857 in Weilburg, the district town of the Limburg-Weilburg district in Hesse. She grew up well protected in a merchant family.
At the age of 20, she married her cousin Theodor Kirchberger in Niederlahnstein on September 2, 1877, where they continued to live afterwards. Charlotte Kirchberger's first child Paul was born there in 1878 and his sister Hedwig the following year.
In 1880 the family moved back to Weilburg - Charlotte Kirchberger's birthplace and the family's ancestral home. There she had her third child in 1884.

Her husband Theodor Kirchberger was a merchant in the wholesale sector for local products and colonial goods. Charlotte Kirchberger's main concern, however, was social welfare. She worked in this area for a long time for various organizations, including as deputy chairwoman of the nursing association in Weilburg from 1914 to 1932.

In 1926, her husband Theodor Kirchberger died, leaving her alone to support herself in the large house in Weilburg, which was a popular meeting place for the extended family. In 1936 she had to sell the house and moved to Aachen to live with her daughter Hedwig, now married to Hellmann. During this time, the Kirchberger family was exposed to increasing exclusion and hostility due to their Jewish descent.

Charlotte Kirchberger's three grandchildren Joachim, Rudolph and Friedrich Kirchberger emigrated to the United States and Chile at an early age. When her daughter and her family also emigrated to the USA in 1938, Charlotte Kirchberger finally moved to Berlin-Nikolassee to live with her son Paul, who worked here as a scientist.

In Nikolassee she made new contacts and settled in well until this was suddenly interrupted by the news of the impending deportation.
On September 7, 1942, at the age of 85, Charlotte Kirchberger committed suicide with sleeping pills at her son's house in Berlin at Palmzeile 6 in order to avoid the deportation to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in northern Bohemia that was planned for the next day. So she ended her own life. Paul Kirchberger managed to have the urn with his mother's ashes buried in the family grave in Weilburg.

The Kirchberger family could not be wiped out by the National Socialists; they have many descendants today. Paul Kirchberger and his family were spared deportation. He survived the Nazi era and the war, but died in Berlin just a few months after the end of the war on December 8, 1945.

In Weilburg, the Kirchberger family was commemorated with an article in the Weilburger Tageblatt dated November 20, 1982, and a stumbling block was also laid there for Charlotte Kirchberger.

(Biographical text based on the research of the students of the Werner von Siemens High School, who also initiated the laying of the stumbling block on September 13, 2022.)

Additions by the Schlachtensee Trace Search Working Group:
The Otto and Anna Levy family from Rehwiese 4 had also lived in the house at Palmzeile 6 since 1938. They had to sell their house there and - unlike their children - were no longer able to emigrate.
Hildegard Jacoby also lived there, about whom Wikipedia says:
Hildegard Jacoby was the daughter of a Jewish father, a doctor, and a non-Jewish mother. After elementary school, she attended the lyceum and then the higher commercial school. She was trained as a welfare worker and worked in various government agencies in the following years. After the handover of power to the NSDAP, she had to give up her civil service because of her Jewish origins and worked in a patent attorney's office. From the beginning of the Second World War she was employed in a parish office until, during the church struggle, she worked in various important administrative functions at the Brethren Council of the Confessing Church of Berlin-Brandenburg. There, Marga Meusel took on interns or volunteers who could no longer work in the public welfare service - including Hildegard Jacoby. This meant that this difficult work became more and more difficult because, for example, T. had to take place conspiratorially, at night or in one or another private apartment, since the Gestapo monitored the activities of the Confessing Church.
During her church service, she also became a helper and rescuer of threatened and persecuted Jews. She came into contact with the resistance circle around the lawyer Franz Kaufmann and Helene Jacobs, both of whom were victims of the Nazi dictatorship. In collaboration with the “Grüber Office”, she provided those affected with hiding places, ration cards and fake personal documents. She was arrested in August 1943, tried by a special court on January 11, 1944 and sentenced to one and a half years in prison. There she fell ill with severe chronic rheumatoid arthritis. The lawyer friend Horst Holstein, Martin Niemöller's defense attorney, advocated for her early release from prison, which also came about on June 2, 1944. An hour later she died of a heart attack in the apartment of the wife of the now murdered lawyer Franz Kaufmann at Schemmstrasse 104 (today Matterhornstrasse 104) in Nikolassee.