Salo Weinberg
* 1870

Salo Weinberg, born 2/27/1870 in Lublin (Poland), murdered on 9/23/1940 at the killing institution Brandenburg on the Havel

Without a Stumbling Stone

The Jewish merchant Salo Weinberg was born on February 27, 1870 in Lublin, Poland, as the son of Hermann and Henriette Weinberg, née Reiss. He was a citizen of Poland, and we do not know when he came to Hamburg, if he had family here or what events led to his admission to the “insane asylum” in Hamburg-Friedrichsberg. around 1900. His patient’s file still exists, it has the number 18035. From other files we know that patients admitted to Friedrichsberg in 1911 had files numbered around 29 000.

From Friedrichsberg. Salo Weinberg was transferred to the “Langenhorn Insane Asylum”, where he probably remained until 1940.

As Salo Weinberg kept his Polish citizenship, he did not become a compulsory member of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany.

In spring and summer of 1940, the Berlin “Euthanasia” agency at Tiergartenstrasse 4 planned a special operation to eliminate all Jewish patients living in public and private mental hospitals in Germany. The agency had all Jewish patients of the institutions registered and then assembled in so-called collecting institutions. In northern Germany, this was the Hamburg-Langenhorn mental hospital. All institutions in Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg and Mecklenburg were ordered to transfer all their Jewish patients to Langenhorn before September 18, 1940.

Salo Weinberg belonged to the group of patients already living at the mental hospital in Hamburg-Langenhorn before the reference date. After the patients from the other institutions in northern Germany had arrived in Langenhorn, they were sent on a transport to Brandenburg on the Havel on September 23, 1940, together with those who had already been living there, among them Salo Weinberg. The transport arrived the same day, and the newly arrived patients were immediately herded into the gas chamber and murdered by carbon monoxide gas in the part of the former prison that had been converted into a gas killing facility. Only Ilse Herta Zachmann temporarily escaped that fate (cf. there).

It is not known if or when family members were notified of Salo Weinberg’s death. In all similar documented notices it was claimed that the deceased had died in Chelm (Polish), resp. Cholm (German).

The people murdered in Brandenburg, however, had never been in the town east of Lublin called Chelm in Polish, Cholm in German. The mental hospital there had ceased to exist after SS troops had murdered almost all its patients on January 12, 1940. And there had never been a German registrar’s office in Chelm. It was solely invented to cover up the murder operations, and recording fictive later dates of death served the purpose of demanding board fees for the already murdered patients.

As no personal home address could be could established for Salo Weinberg, no place for laying a Stumbling Stone to commemorate him individually could be named.

Translation by Peter Hubschmid
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.