Valentin Ernst Burchard
* 1891

Ernst Valentin Burchard, born 26 Jan. 1891, deported 8 Nov. 1941 to Minsk
Ernst Valentin Burchard was born into a Jewish family in Hamburg on 26 January 1891. He attended school in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel and then entered into a commercial apprenticeship at various export companies in Hamburg. He volunteered for a year of military service in the Imperial Army, and was assigned to a unit in Schwerin. From 1913 to 1915 he lived and worked in Buenos Aires. At the outbreak of the First World War, he prepared to return to Germany. He procured falsified documents and returned to his homeland, with several detours, and reported for duty. He was given the rank of corporal and assigned to the Western Front.

Immediately after the war, Valentin Burchard again went abroad. He spent some time in the Netherlands, then returned to Hamburg in 1920 and opened his own business. In March 1921 he married Olga Jonas. The couple had three children in the 1920s: two daughters, Gabriele and Marianne, and one son, Valentin. Until the summer of 1935 they lived on Schwanenwik on the on the Outer Alster Lake.

In addition to his business activities, Burchard was also a member of the Industrial Commission and the Chamber of Commerce, and served for a time as a judge in a labor court. In 1928 he became a member of the board at Hugo Peters & Co. AG, a wine trading and distilling company. A few years later he opened his own wine wholesale business in Hamburg-Uhlenhorst. When the increasing Nazi persecution and disenfranchisement of Jewish citizens forced the Burchards to leave their apartment on Schwanenwik in August 1935, they moved into the building at Papenhuder Straße 53, where the company was located.

In April 1932, Burchard was elected to the Hamburg Parliament on the German State Party (Deutsche Staatspartei) ticket. In his few speeches to Parliament, he lambasted the deflationary policies of Reich Chancellor Brüning’s cabinet and their catastrophic consequences for Hamburg’s economy. “As long as economic policies such as these are continued, [all plans] are of no avail,” he said in 1932 of the possible strategies of pursuing an independent policy in Hamburg. Brüning’s uncompromising hold-the-course policy not only overstretched the productivity of the population, causing great numbers to turn to the political parties on the extreme left or extreme right, especially the Nazi Party, but also drove many of those who were trying to uphold a democratic form of government into a feeling of resignation.

Burchard lost his seat in Parliament when it was reconstituted according to the “Provisional Law for the Consolidation of the States with the Reich” (Vorläufiges Gesetz zur Gleichschaltung der Länder mit dem Reich), in line with the results of the Reichstag elections of 5 March 1933. After the Nazi regime banned all political parties other than their own in the summer of 1933, Burchard turned all of his attention to his profession, although, as a Jew, he was a victim of the Nazi regime’s repressive measures. With the revenues from his wine trading business sinking, Burchard founded a new company, Valentin Burchard & Co., in August 1935. It manufactured pharmaceuticals for export. Burchard was personally liable for the company and in charge of sales. The pharmacist Geza von Molnar was a limited partner and was head of production.

The company rented a small factory at Am Vogelreth 8 in the free port. There it produced “fluid extracts, tinctures and other pharmaceutical products.” Thanks to Burchard’s many business contacts abroad, there was a good market for the products in South and Central America, but also in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Asia. Although the company developed well and profits were predicted to rise, the withdrawal of Oscar Friedländer and John Hausmann as limited partners in April 1937 caused serious difficulties for the company. It was rescued, however, when Emmy Jonas, the sister of Burchard’s wife Olga, became a partner.

In September 1938 the process of “Aryanization” was at its height, and Valentin Burchard became a victim of it. He had applied for an exit visa from the Chamber of Industry and Commerce (IHK) in order to take a business trip. When the IHK inquired with the tax authorities as to whether Burchard, if granted a visa, had furnished a security for the payment of the Reich flight tax (Reichsfluchtsteuer), he became the target of sanctions on the part of the authorities. After an odyssey through the hands of countless clerks in countless offices, the inquiry resulted in the confiscation of Burchard’s property and finally in his deportation. His fate is an exemplary illustration of the many facets of the Nazi persecution of Jews. German civil authorities played a large part in carrying out the technicalities of the Holocaust.

Immediately after it was known that Burchard had applied for the visa, the foreign exchange office of the tax authority informed all relevant offices at the tax authority and initiated an investigation on the suspicion of smuggling money out of the country. The police were called in and asked to investigate, and the customs investigations office opened an investigation into a possible intention to emigrate. Although the police investigation concluded that Burchard had no intention of emigrating, the visa was denied – the Groenesche Trade School in Hamburg had allegedly requested that Burchard’s passport be blocked because a negligible amount of his daughter’s tuition fees had not been paid.

At the request of the customs investigations office, the IHK Hamburg informed the federal authorities in 1938 that Burchard’s export company had developed well. The IHK assumed that it would continue to grow, and, in light of the dramatic lack of foreign currency in the Reich, it considered the company “of importance for the national economy.” For this reason, the IHK continues, it was advisable to “transfer [the company] into Aryan ownership.” Shortly afterwards, the Regional Economic Administration (Gauwirtschaftsleitung) began with the “Aryanization” of the company.

In January 1939, Valentin Burchard was forced to sell his company to the Chinosolfabrik AG. The selling price was set so low that Burchard, after settling all outstanding debts, was, for all intents and purposes, destitute. After the company had been confiscated and taken over by Chinosol, he was allowed to retain a position, at a modest salary, until the contract of purchase was settled. It was intended that he retain this position until the end of 1939, but because the settlement of the transfer was delayed due to the outbreak of the war, he was allowed to stay until 1 September 1940.

In the same month as the “Aryanization” process began and Hitler announced to the world “the annihilation of Jewdom in Europe” in the event of war, Burchard applied for permission for his family to emigrate to the Netherlands. By July 1939 he had painstakingly gathered all of the certificates and documents that the foreign exchange office of the Hamburg tax authority required to process the application.

The emigration was to be financed with the redemption of a life insurance policy in Great Britain, but, after his property had been confiscated, Burchard was not able to pay the equivalent of the insurance, 410 pounds sterling, demanded by the foreign exchange office.

An attempt to raise the sum abroad by taking out a loan on the life insurance policy was thwarted with the German invasion of Poland and the outbreak of the Second World War. After Germany and Great Britain declared war, Burchard no longer received replies from his broker in England.

At this point it seems that Burchard gave up all attempts to emigrate. His file at the foreign exchange office of the Hamburg tax authority was closed in November 1939 with the memorandum that Burchard had not replied to the notification that he was to deliver the sum of £410 in the currency of a neutral country to the foreign exchange office.

When the mass deportations from the Altreich began in October 1941, Burchard’s family was among the 60,000 Jews who were deported from German cities to the ghettos in Warsaw, Lodz, Bialystok, Riga, Kowno, and Minsk. Valentin Burchard, his wife Olga and his two daughters Gabriele and Marianne were among the 1000 Hamburg Jews who were herded together on the Moorweide across from the Dammtor train station on 8 November 1941, in full public view, and loaded onto one of the seventeen deportation trains. Their train reached the Minsk ghetto two days later. After this date there is no further trace of the Burchard family. It is unknown whether their suffering ended in the Minsk ghetto, or if it was only a layover on the way to one of the extermination camps.

At the request of his surviving son, Ernst Valentin Burchard was declared dead after the war. The date of death was registered as 8 May 1945.

© Reprinted with the kind permission of the Parliament of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (eds.) from: Jörn Lindner/Frank Müller: “Mitglieder der Bürgerschaft – Opfer totalitärer Verfolgung,” 3rd revised and supplemented edition, Hamburg 2012