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Henry Polles * 1890

Vereinsstraße 7 (Eimsbüttel, Eimsbüttel)

1941 Minsk
ermordet 24.01.1945 Neuengamme

further stumbling stones in Vereinsstraße 7:
Rolf Wilhelm Simon, Auguste Spitzkopf, Alfred Spitzkopf, Kurt Spitzkopf, Ruth Spitzkopf, Charlotte Spitzkopf, Heinz Ruben Spitzkopf

Henry Polles, b. 5.5.1890 in Geyer, Saxony, on 11.8.1941, deported from Hamburg to Minsk, died on 1.24.1945 in Bremen-Blumenthal, a satellite camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp

Vereinsstraße 7

In 1927, Henry Polles was registered for the first time as a member of the Jewish Congregation of Hamburg. Whether he first moved to Hamburg in that year and where he lived up until then is not known. His parents Mathilde and David Polles already left his birthplace in Geyer in the Ore Mountains of Saxony, in 1903, when he was 13 years old, and resettled in Leipzig.

Mathilde Polles was born in 1853, a daughter of the Fürth family in Prague, then a part of Austria-Hungary. Her one-year older husband came from Warsaw, then a part of the Russian Empire. They settled down in Geyer after their marriage. The merchant David Polles dealt in "drapery,” that is corsets, towels, carpets, and silk goods, as well as everything in the way of clothing for ladies, gentlemen, and children. The great sales space, with several show windows and display cases, was located on the ground floor of the Zwönitzerstrasse thoroughfare; in the floor above lived the family. David Polles must have made a name for himself in Geyer, for, as a 1905 advertisement in the publication celebrating the town’s anniversary, the man who took over the business operated it under the name Alex Liebenthal, "D. Polles, successor.”

Mathilde and David Polles had three children. The oldest son was born in October 1884 and bore the name Julian Richard. Hugo came into the world almost on the same day, three years later. He died in 1888, just seven months old, in his parental home. The youngest son received the name Henry and was six years younger than Richard.

Like his father, Henry Polles practiced a commercial profession, but as an employee. In Hamburg he worked at first as a bookkeeper in the famous Bucky department store on the Eimsbütteler Chaussee, later at the L. Wagner haberdashery at Elbstrasse 70. Between 1929 and 1934, he lived temporarily outside Hamburg; from 1934 he again earned his keep in the Hansa City. In all those years, he did not start a family and never had his own home, but rather lived as a sub-letter, changing his address almost annually. From the beginning of 1939, he was again and again unemployed or working only temporarily. Henry’s older brother Richard lived in Berlin at Grellstrasse 66. On 7 August 1940, the Gestapo took him to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he died four days later.

Henry Polles, aged 51 years, was deported from Hamburg to Minsk on 8 November 1941. At the time he lived in a room at a Mrs. Rimberg’s on Karolinenstrasse 6. When he lived at Vereinstrasse 7, where his commemorative stone lies in front of postwar buildings, has not been ascertained.

Henry Polles held out for a long time against the SS-Terror in Minsk. Heinz Rosenberg, one of the few survivors of the ghetto, mentions him in his book, "Years of Horror.” After the dissolution of the ghetto in October 1943, Rosenberg, as well as Polles and numerous other, largely young and single men, were removed from Minsk. Together they suffered through a horrific odyssey in ten forced labor and extermination camps: Treblinka, Budzyń 1 and Budzyń 2 (the Heinkel airplane factory), Rzeszow/Reichshof (Daimler-Benz), Plaszow, Wieliczka, Flossenbürg, Colmar, Sachsenhausen, Bremen-Blumenthal, and Bremen-Schützenhof. Both of the last-named were satellite camps of Neuengamme concentration camp. In December 1944, Henry Polles presumably made it to Bremen-Schützenhof. In that month, hundreds of prisoners arrived who had already done forced labor at Bremen-Blumenthal for the Krupp concern’s Deschimag (German Ship and Machine Construction, Inc.). Now they were put to work for Deschimag, producing U-boat parts and building U-boat bunkers, "hornets’ nests.” Heinz Rosenberg described the situation of the Schützenhof prisoners in his book: "In these weeks [January 1945, fs], many prisoners lost their lives. Every evening ten or fifteen had to be carried or carted off. They were unloaded in the camp, and a so-called SS-camp doctor and the camp elder beat them so long that they either died or crawled off, in order to work again the next day. Ten people died every day.” Henry Polles survived until 24 January 1945.

Translator: Richard Levy
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: February 2018
© Frauke Steinhäuser

Quellen: 1; 4; 5; 8; Archiv der Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen; Stadt Ehrenfriedersdorf, Standesamt; Stadtarchiv Geyer; Festschrift Heimatfest Geyer/Erzgebirge, 1905; Die Toten – Konzentrationslager Neuengamme (Datenbank); KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme, Außenlager und Gedenkstätten: Bremen-Blumenthal, Bremen Schützenhof: http://kurzurl.net/V3H5h (Zugriff 4.1.2012); Amtliches Fernsprechbuch Hamburg 1937; Rosenberg, Jahre des Schreckens, S. 88 u. 139.
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