Herbert Cohen
* 1918

Herbert Cohen, born 5.8.1918, imprisoned on 9.11.1938 as part of the November pogroms and taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, murdered there on 5.12.1938

Dillstraße 21, Rotherbaum

Herbert Cohen was born in Hamburg on August 5, 1918. He had six siblings, two sisters and four brothers. His parents Sarah Selma Cohen, née Müller, and Jakob Cohen died in 1926 and 1928. The family was Jewish.

Herbert Cohen and his brother Erich, born April 1, 1920, were foster children of the Richard Hasenberg family in Bornstraße. Richard Hasenberg was an office worker at the building police, which at the time was part of the police department (Baupolizei) as Department VIII. He had become unemployed at the end of 1931. His family rented out rooms in their 5 1/2 room apartment and took in foster children.

On the cover of Richard Hasenberg's welfare file, the names of Erich and Herbert Cohen are noted with their dates of birth and later crossed out. Until March 1936, Erich Cohen was placed with the Hasenberg family together with the foster child Richard Frankenthal, born on April 9, 1924. In a note about a house visit by the welfare department on March 15, 1936, it was stated that a care recipient was to be placed in a home and had therefore been given notice to leave on March 31, 1936. This was Erich Cohen, as Richard Frankenthal was still living in the Hasenberg family's apartment. A note dated June 8, 1936 mentions a 17-year-old student who was now living with the Hasenberg family. This was probably Herbert Cohen. The welfare authorities continued to pay RM 55 for his accommodation, as they had previously done for his brother. (RM 28 was paid for the then 12-year-old Richard Frankenthal.) Herbert Cohen is not referred to as a foster child in the file, possibly because he had already completed elementary school at this time.

According to the school authorities, who referred to the former principal of the Jewish Talmud Tora School, Arthur Spier, Herbert Cohen left the Talmud Tora elementary school at Easter 1933. As he had difficulties finding an apprenticeship as a Jew, “he returned to the Talmud Tora School and attended the ‘locksmith department’ there. This department was founded in 1934 to prepare pupils and former pupils of the Talmud Torah School who intended to emigrate to the then Mandate territory of Palestine for a trade.”

Herbert Cohn's siblings, on the other hand, assumed that Herbert was employed as an apprentice at the “J.H.C. Karstadt-Porges” company. However, no evidence of this was found in the restitution proceedings, so that the training at the Talmud Tora School described by the school authorities must be assumed.

Herbert Cohn later lived as a subtenant at Dillstraße 21; the exact date of his move from Bornstraße 6 to Dillstraße 21 is not known. He was probably arrested during the pogrom on November 9, 1938, taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and given the prisoner number 8333, where he died a month later on December 5, 1938.

According to a statement from the International Red Cross dated November 9, 1967, the cause of death was “lower lobe inflammation” (pneumonia) on the right side. According to the lawyer Koenig in the restitution proceedings, Herbert Cohen died as a result of “external violence”.

He was buried in the Berlin-Weißensee Jewish Cemetery.

The exhibition “We don't need Jews here - Hamburg's Jewish police officers - repressed, persecuted, forgotten (1918-1952)” paid tribute to Herbert Cohn's fate as Richard Hasenberg's foster son.

Herbert Cohn's sister Paula married the non-Jewish Adolf Schmidt and survived the persecution in a so-called mixed marriage. In her restitution file, she stated that she only escaped deportation to Theresienstadt in 1945 because she was unfit to travel in the Israelite Hospital. In June 1944, Adolf Schmidt was conscripted into forced labor, so-called clean-up work, as a person “with a Jewish background” (“jüdisch Versippter”).

His sister Ruth married Isaak Wertheimer. She and her husband and their two children fled to Amsterdam in the Netherlands in 1936 and 1937 respectively, but were deported from there via the Westerbork transit camp to Auschwitz on September 7, 1943, where they were murdered. Stumbling stones were laid for Ruth, Isaak and their children Marion and Heinz Wertheimer at Rutschbahn 3 in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel (for biographies, see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de).

The brothers Kurt, Josef, Erich and Alfred were able to emigrate to England in time and survived there.

Translation: Beate Meyer