Memory of the Hattendorf and Kugelmann families

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Oldenburg – Steles, which were inaugurated on Saturday, commemorate the fate of the Hattendorf family at Bremer Straße 58 and the Osternburg branch of the actually Wardenburg Kugelmann family at Cloppenburger Straße 2.

Four daughters

According to Dietmar Schütz from the Oldenburg Community Foundation, the butcher Moritz Hattendorf lived in the house at Bremer Straße 58 with his wife Nanny, née Lomnitz, and their four daughters Ella (April 24, 1896), Grete July 16, 1898, Frieda (April 27, 1900). and Emma (March 20, 1902). The daughters, with the exception of Ella, married and left Oldenburg in the 1920s and 1930s: Gretchen went to Hanover in 1915 and later to Hamburg, Emma, ​​who had worked as a saleswoman, to Hildesheim in 1923, Frieda, also a saleswoman, in 1934 to Berlin . Father Moritz Hattendorf died on October 11, 1936 in Oldenburg. Mother Nanny stayed with her eldest daughter in the Oldenburg house with a garden.

IN MEMORY
2,500 people take part in a memorial walk in Oldenburg

In April 1940, Nanny Hattendorf and Ella had to move to Hamburg “for reasons of persecution” – as her surviving daughter Emma reported. The reason for the move was possibly the reports from the East Frisian district administrators that East Frisia was “Jew-free”, which Emma and her family obviously also feared for Osternburg.

To Theresienstadt

The now divorced daughter Grete also lived in Hamburg. Several moves up to Isestrasse 69, where a stumbling block was laid for Ella Hattendorf, separated the paths of mother and daughters. Ella was deported to Riga, Jungfernhof on December 6, 1941. The mother, Nanny, was initially excluded from the transports because of her age. They were supposed to be deported to the “retirement ghetto” Theresienstadt, which happened later.

At the age of 78, she was deported to Theresienstadt on July 15, 1942 and from there to Treblinka on September 21, where she was murdered. Her daughter Grete followed her mother to Theresienstadt four days later. Two years later, on May 15, 1944, she was taken to Auschwitz and murdered there. Her daughter Frieda was deported from Cologne to Minsk with her husband Emil Mayer on July 20, 1942 and murdered there.

One managed to escape

Only the youngest daughter Emma managed to escape to Bolivia in time in March 1939, together with her husband Karl Weinberg, who had worked as a self-employed house agent in Hamburg, a six-year-old daughter and one-year-old son.

Moritz Hattendorf was Kugelmann’s cousin, née Hattendorf, married to Daniel Kugelmann. The two were the parents of Semmi Kugelmann, the Osternburg branch of the Wardenburger Kugelmann. Schütz, a native of Wardenburg, has a special relationship with the Kugelmann family. His mother, born in 1913, attended elementary school there. Selma Kugelmann was her best friend. A stele at Cloppenburger Straße 2 now commemorates the fate of this family.