A Disturbing Visit to Hamburg

by Neal R. Wagner

At Christmas time in 2014 (so eight years after the visits in the rest of this writeup) my younger son and I visited my older son again in Berlin. We made a side trip to Hamburg and saw lots of stuff: the harbor, the new philharmonic hall (infinitely expensive and not yet completed back then), but especially we visited the Universität Hamburg, where I had spent the 1962-63 academic year (well, the rough German approximation). I wondered what I would remember after sixty years.

We stopped by the dorm where I spent all but my first month: the Franziskus Kolleg. The picture below shows the front entrance, giving its name and identifying itself as Internationales kath. Haus für Studierende (International catholic house (um, dorm I guess) for students).

When I was there, they admitted only males, and Germans had to be Catholic, others not necessarily. It was a nice place, with mostly south Germans running it, including nuns doing the cooking, so we were eating noodles rather than boiled potatoes. Anyway we were standing around when my son John noticed a plaque on the building, shown below with translations.

See Gedenktafel. So you don't have to read my clumsy literal translation, I'll summarize it here: starting in 1886 the building had been used as a home for elderly Jews. In 1942 ninety of them were shipped off to concentration camps. It lets you decide for yourself what became of those rounded up, and it doesn't say how it came to be owned by the Catholic church. Twenty-three years after I left they put up the plaque, and I give them credit for that.

Am 10.1.1886 wurde hier -- ermöglicht
durch Stiftungen von Isaac Hartvig und
Ephraime Edwards -- das Altenhaus der
ehemaligen Deutsch-Israelitischen
Gemeinde eröffnet. Dieses bot den
alten Menschen unentgeltlich Wohnung
und Lebensunterhalt.

Im Juli 1942 wurden mehr als neunzig
Bewohner in das KZ Auschwitz und das
Getto Theresienstadt deportiert.

ERINNERUNG IST DER WEG
ZUR ERLÖSUNG.
(Gedenkstätte Jad Washem, Jerusalem)

Bezirksversammlung Eimsbüttel 1986

On January 10, 1886 was here -- made possible
through donations by Isaac Hartvig and
Ephraime Edwards -- the old people's home of
the former German-Israelite
community opened. This offered the
old people free housing
and livelihood.

In July 1942 were more than ninety
residents deported to the
concentration camp Auschwitz and the
Theresienstadt ghetto.

MEMORY IS THE WAY
TO SALVATION.
(Yad Washem Memorial, Jerusalem)

District assembly Eimsbüttel 1986

For more information in English, there is a book about the history of the "home for Jewish elderly", but it covers only history before 1900 and barely mentions the deportation.

There is a much better reference in German: Franziskus Kolleg (German) . It has a lot of information and even answers the question of how the Catholic church ended up owning it: the Deutsch-Israelitische Gemeinde sold it in 1958 to the Franziscans, just in time for me to live there in 1962.