Laura Mosbach
* 1876

Laura Mosbach, née Horwitz, born on 1 Feb. 1876 in Bünde, deported on 6 Dec. 1941 to Riga, date of death unknown

District of Harburg-Altstadt, Am Centrumshaus 1

Laura Mosbach and her husband Alfred, born in Lüdenscheid and four years her senior, had initially lived in Werl/Westphalia for several years and started a family there, before becoming members of the Harburg Synagogue Community (Synagogengemeinde). Their son Harry was born on 6 Mar. 1902 and daughter Hildegard on 24 June 1905. After their move, the family resided at Wilstorfer Strasse 45 (intersection to Moorstrasse), where Alfred Mosbach ran a greengrocery, which he later relocated to the lower section of Bergstrasse (today Am Centrumshaus). This Jewish store, too, became a target of the Harburg National Socialists, when they took up their posts in front of the entrance with placards on 1 Apr. 1933 to point out to customers that the owner was of “non-Aryan” descent.

Although the boycott was ended after one day, the worries about the future of the business remained. On 10 Jan. 1934, Alfred Mosbach had to close his store on Bergstrasse for good. Aged 62, he did not find any new employment, especially since he was declared unfit for work after a medical exam. He had to try to make ends meet somehow with his modest welfare benefits.

The parents were also very much worried about their two children’s future. Daughter Hildegard emigrated with her husband to Palestine in 1935, at the age of 30, in order to escape from further persecution and make a fresh start abroad.

Her brother attempted to adjust to the new circumstances on location in Harburg, after he had married, on 7 July 1933, Martha Runzler (born on 4 Nov. 1910), a non-Jewish woman from Mecklenburg eight years his junior. She managed a pleats and needlework store at Bergstrasse 5, which belonged to a block of houses that the city’s own German Housing Society (Deutsche Wohnungsbau-Gesellschaft – D.W.G.) had built next to Harburg City Hall at the end of the 1920s, managing and renting it out since then.

Even before the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws on race (“Nürnberger Rassengesetze”) on 22 Aug. 1935, Martha Mosbach received written notification from the D.W.G. on the orders of the Harburg mayor Dyes that the lease for the store on Bergstrasse would expire on 30 Sept. 1935 because her husband was a Jew. Martha Mosbach filed an appeal against this termination. As a result, the Harburg city council even dealt with her appeal in its session on 5 Sept. 1935. However, her complaint was unsuccessful “because the marriage of the tenant … is deemed a deliberate racial defilement and thus a grievous offence against the National Socialist viewpoint and the city council cannot be expected to promote this type of crime by acquiescence.”

Before Mayor Dyes responded to the appeal officially on 7 Sept. 1935, he examined the question whether in the “Mosbach case,” a public “special operation” – such as the erection of a large banner with corresponding text – was called for. In his final reply, however, he turned down Martha Mosbach’s complaint primarily with formal legal arguments: “Since you married the non-Aryan Mosbach and since the city, based on the recently applicable regulations of the standardized Reich lease contract (Reichseinheitsmietvertrag) for married spouses, has to demand the signatures of both spouses, the contract for the store would now also have to be signed by your husband as well and thus, a new contractual relationship between the city and your husband would have to be entered. However, the city rightfully refuses a contractual relationship with a non-Aryan, especially since you entered the marital union with the non-Aryan long after the [Nazi] seizure of power, thus positioning yourself outside the German national community [Volksgemeinschaft].”

Martha Mosbach was not the only leaseholder receiving notice from the German Housing Society in the fall of 1935. Eleven other tenants fared just the same. There was nothing Ludwig Fliess, the head of the Harburg Synagogue Community, could do about that, not even with a letter to Mayor Dyes.

Martha Mosbach did find another store she could rent, because the landlord attached importance to the rent payment and not to religion or “race.” A child she gave birth to in 1936 died shortly after birth. In this oppressive situation, Harry Mosbach was arrested on 23 June 1938 in connection with the so-called “June operation” (Juni-Aktion) and committed to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The detention lasted for two months and would certainly have extended for much longer if his wife had not repeatedly gone to the Gestapo and assured them credibly that she intended to emigrate to Palestine with her husband immediately, as soon as he was released. Relatives in Amsterdam would pay for the ship’s passage. On 19 Nov. 1938, Harry Mosbach took a plane from Hamburg Airport to Amsterdam. From there, he went to Genoa, where he met up with his wife and departed for Palestine.

His parents were not granted this stroke of good fortune, even though they also pursued emigration to Palestine after the dramatic escalation of anti-Jewish persecution in 1938. The formalities required to this end dragged on for several months. At the end of June 1939, Alfred and Laura Mosbach cleared their Harburg apartment and auctioned off the greater part of their household effects that they had to leave behind for reasons of space. The last days before their planned departure were spent with relatives at Grindelallee 6. On 5 Sept. 1939, when Alfred Mosbach wanted to pick up the entry visa for Palestine from the British Consulate in Hamburg, he encountered locked doors because Great Britain and Germany were in a state of war by then. The subsequent attempt to reach Palestine via Vienna and Constanta in Romania failed as well. Alfred Mosbach died of a heart attack in Hamburg on 21 May 1940 at the age of 68, without having seen his children in Palestine even once more.

One and a half years later, his wife Laura was among the 747 Hamburg Jews deported to Riga on 6 Dec. 1941. A fellow sufferer, Thekla Bernau (born on 29 May 1900), with whom she spent the last hours before the deportation, described to her children on the eve of the departure how those affected felt: “Now we know: We will be off on 5 or 6 December. No one asks where to. Everyone knows it, and no one admits to it. We are now eleven persons in the two rooms … When I think everything over, my lips dry up, and I cannot think any longer. … Laura Mosbach [is one of us. She] comes from Bünde in Westphalia and knows how to roll cigars from old leaves and newspapers. However, neither the Wenkels nor the Grothkopps want to smoke them. She is sad. Who wants to smoke today anyway! … Is Saint Nicholas’ Day today or tomorrow? One forgets that which is. It would be better if one were able to forget even more. … In the evening, I have a crying fit. Mrs. Wenkel says it will be the same as with the previous transports. That the cattle cars stand in the Sternschanze neighborhood. Open. Women and men separate ... „

For Laura Mosbach, this transport from Hamburg was a journey to death.

Translator: Erwin Fink

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.