Bella Spanier
* 1884

Bella Spanier, born on 25 Feb. 1884 in Lesum (today a district of Bremen), deported in 25 Oct. 1941 to Lodz, deported on 10 May 1942 to Chelmno and murdered

Tegetthoffstrasse 9 / Rosenallee 11 (school), Klostertor

Bella Spanier was born in Lesum in 1884. Today Burg-Lesum is a district of Bremen, but until the territorial reform on 1 Nov. 1939, it was Prussian. Bella’s parents were the Jewish merchant Jacob Spanier and his wife Caroline, née Neumark. Jacob Spanier, the son of the merchant Ruben Spanier from Hamburg and his wife Karoline, née Fränckel, passed away in Hamburg in 1916.

Bella had an older sister by the name of Rebecca, who was born in Burgdamm (also under the jurisdiction of the Lesum registry office) in 1881. Probably the Spanier family moved to Hamburg when the girls were still children. Bella Spanier became a teacher and taught for many years at the eight-grade girls’ elementary school (Volksschule) at Rosenallee 11. She had received her training at the teachers’ college in Altona and started her professional career in Hamburg in June 1906, at the age of 22. She was a Social Democrat, member of the “Society of Friends of the Patriotic School and Education System” (“Gesellschaft der Freunde des Vaterländischen Schul- und Erziehungswesens”), and an adherent of progressive teaching methods (Reformpädagogik). Very popular with her students, she enjoyed going with her classes to the Moorwerder “urban colony” on Bunthäuser Spitze, which exists as an open-air school to this day. Bella Spanier was short and petite. She wore her dark hair in a bob with a center parting. After 27 years of professional life, she was dismissed based on the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” (“Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums”) dated 7 Apr. 1933, since she was Jewish and a member of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). A letter by the Hamburg Staatsamt (the regional seat of government) to the Gestapo dated 6 May 1934 read, “The Spanier woman was dismissed on 22 July 1933 because she does not guarantee championing the national state without reservations.”

Bella Spanier lived at Tegetthoffstrasse 9 on the fourth floor. One floor below resided her parents. The fourth floor also accommodated Miss T. and M. Hubert, with whom Bella Spanier may have shared an apartment. In the early 1930s – probably after her dismissal from the school service – she moved with her widowed mother to Bismarckstrasse 6, where they stayed with Bella’s sister Rebecca, who in Feb. 1911 had married the merchant Iwan Selke in Hamburg. Iwan Selke was born in Hamburg in 1876. He owned an exporting company. Bella’s and Rebecca’s mother Caroline passed away in Aug. 1937. Her gravestone is located in the Jewish Cemetery in Langenfelde.

We do not know how Bella Spanier fared between 1933 and Oct. 1941, when she received the deportation order. She had to set out on the first Hamburg deportation to Lodz, where she was committed to quarters at Richterstrasse 9/11 (today Tokarska). The apartment consisted of two rooms at the most, which accommodated ten additional persons. There was not even running water in the house. She lived there together with the Hamburg teacher Else Rauch, for whom a Stolperstein was laid at Grindelallee 152 and who is commemorated by Else-Rauch-Platz, a square in Eimsbüttel. Betty Holstein and her sister Ellen Kämpfer (see corresponding entries) resided their as well. All four of them were murdered in the Chelmno extermination camp on 10 May 1942.

Her sister Rebecca and brother-in-law Iwan Selke were deported shortly after Bella Spanier, on 6 Dec. 1941, to Riga.

Translator: Erwin Fink
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.