Alice Spitz (1906 - 1942)

Alice Spitz, née Minden, was murdered in March 1942 together with her five children. She stands for countless women who were victims in a double sense in the National Socialist state of injustice: they were killed because they were Jewish, and they had to endure not being able to protect their children. They lost their lives, the right and the possibility to lead a fulfilled and effective life. That is why we are telling about her, her life and her fate.

She was born in Herten, Westphalia, on 15 November 1906, the second of what would later become eleven children of Rosa and David Minden. In 1918/19, the Jewish family of ten moved to Schleswig-Holstein. Three more children were born in Boostedt and Bad Bramstedt. The Minden couple last lived at Kieler Straße 95.

On 18.04.1929 she married the self-employed master (custom) tailor Jakob Spitz, born on 14.12.1901 in Krzepice/Poland, in Katernberg, district of Essen.

Their first two children Hans Georg (22.12.1929) and Ines (29.03.1931) were born in Barmen and Elberfeld (Wuppertal). On 01.06.1933 the Spitz family moved to Neumünster and had the other children Egon (05.02.1934), Lea (05.03.1937) and Bernd (15.07.1938). They first lived at Rutenkamp 14 and from 01.06.1934 at Kieler Str. 21.

The family belonged to the Jewish community in Bad Segeberg; Jakob Spitz was a member of the community board in 1938/1939.

As for all Jews, the Spitz family's living conditions changed dramatically with the beginning of the National Socialist era. Around the turn of the year 1937/38, the persecution of Jews became more radical. Jews with Polish citizenship living in Germany in 1938/39 were particularly at risk. They were threatened with forced expulsion from Germany, and at the same time they were threatened by their country of origin, Poland, with the revocation of their citizenship and a refusal of entry. The first forced expulsions from the "Reich" ("Polish Action") took place from 27 October 1938; these were then initially abandoned due to organisational difficulties.

Jakob Spitz, who came from Poland and had lived in Germany since about 1920/22, was one of the threatened persons. Although he was a Polish citizen, he was presumably not yet affected by the expulsions in October 1938.

Jakob Spitz, who survived abroad, reported after the war that as a result of the boycott of Jews from 1936 onwards he hardly earned any income from his tailoring business and therefore had to rely on the support of the Jewish Aid Society. As of 01.01.1939, Jews were also prohibited from practising a trade independently on the basis of a corresponding ordinance. This will also have affected Jakob Spitz. The family's situation must therefore have been extremely precarious.

The existential fears and fears of persecution then intensified after the nationwide pogrom of 09/10 November 1938. The National Socialists used the murder of an embassy employee in Paris, carried out by a young Polish Jew whose parents had been affected by the forced expulsions to Poland in October, as a reason for the anti-Semitic riots.

On the night of the pogrom, four Jewish men in Neumünster, among them Egon Minden (Alice Spitz's brother), were taken from their homes, humiliated, mistreated, taken into so-called "protective custody" and taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. It is uncertain whether Jakob Spitz was also affected by this. It could not be determined whether or what happened to him that night or how he managed to remain unmolested.

It is known of Egon Minden that he remained in custody until the end of November 1938 and was then forced to emigrate. He emigrated to Belgium on 29 April 1939. There is a detailed elaboration on his life and the fate of the family by Gerhard Scheurich entitled "Ein Stolperstein mit Fragezeichen" (A Stolperstein with a question mark), published in 2016 by epubli GmbH, Berlin.

The older children of Alice and Jakob Spitz, Hans Georg and Ines, were re-registered to Hamburg from 27 December 1938, i.e. shortly after the November events; they were 9 and 7 years old respectively at that time. With regard to the reasons for the children's change of residence, it can only be assumed that they were - somehow - to be brought to safety. In Hamburg, they were initially registered at the address Laufgraben 13; later, according to a note from the grandfather David Minden in 1939 regarding his grandson Hans Georg, they were in a home; it was the Jewish orphanage Am Papendamm 3. Since the children came to Hamburg at the same time, it is assumed that Ines was also in this institution.

In the spring of 1939, the expulsion policy towards Polish or formerly Polish Jews who had now become stateless was resumed (see above). Persons/families affected by this were ordered to leave the territory of the Reich within a short period of time. Apparently Jakob Spitz was one of them. Like other affected families, Mr. and Mrs. Spitz decided that first the husband should leave and then, they hoped, the family could join him from the safety of abroad.

On 18 May 1939 Jakob Spitz left Germany and emigrated to France.

Alice Spitz, now on her own, was able to arrange for her two-year-old Lea to be brought to safety in a Kindertransport to England on 22 August 1939, shortly before the war began. At the same time, she dissolved her household at Kieler Straße 21 on 16 August 1939, stored her belongings with the Selck company and temporarily lived in the attic of the same house with her children Egon (5 years old) and Bernd (1 year old). Whether the liquidation of the flat was connected with the hope of emigration, with financial hardship or with the "Law on the Tenancy of Jews" of 30 April 1939/DVO of 4 May 1939 (loss of tenant protection) remains open.

With the outbreak of the war on 01.09.1939, the situation changed abruptly. Jakob Spitz now had no possibility (if there ever was one) of having his relatives join him, and finally, as a result of the political and war-related events, contact with the family broke off.

His wife Alice, it can be assumed, did everything she could in this desperate situation to find a way out:

In the early summer of 1940, Alice Spitz and her children Egon and Bernd first lived with her parents at Kieler Str. 95 for almost five months, followed by a change of residence for the two boys from 23 July 1940 to Hamburg, Marktstr. 39, as was the case before for the older children Hans-Georg and Ines. She herself stayed in Berlin-Grunewald from September 1940 to March 1941 at the address Königsallee 11a. The property belonged to the Jewish Community of Berlin; a Jewish home for the elderly was located there.  It can be assumed that during this stay in the big city of Berlin she was looking for a possibility for safe accommodation.

For the time after that, it is certain that she and all her children were registered in Hamburg, Beneckestraße 26, in a so-called "Jews' House" (Judenhaus) from the summer of 1941. This was not voluntary accommodation. We also know that she had another child in the summer of 1941: Denny (born 12 August 1941).

(The building at Beneckestraße 26 in Hamburg's Grindelviertel no longer exists today. The property now belongs to the university campus).

A short time later, after a ban on emigration had been imposed on the Jews on 23 October 1941, the first deportations began, namely to the territories in Eastern Europe (including the Baltic States) that had been occupied since June 1941.

Alice Spitz and her five children were part of a transport that deported 753 Jews from Hamburg and 133 Jews from Schleswig-Holstein to Latvia on 6 December 1941.

The destination of the transport was the Riga ghetto. The Latvian Jews crammed in there were murdered to "make room" for the Jews transported from the "Reich". In the massacres of the Latvian Jews on 30 November and 8/9 December 1941, 26,500 people were killed. Since the murder operations had not yet been completed when the Hamburg transport arrived, they were diverted to the provisional Riga-Jungfernhof subcamp. Deported Jews from other German cities were already there. Inhumane conditions during transport and accommodation, as well as sub-zero temperatures of 30-35 degrees, already claimed hundreds of victims. Sick people were deliberately killed from February 1942 onwards, and on 26 March 1942 about 1700 to 1800 elderly people, women and children were shot in the Hochwald forest in Riga.

These were the first targeted and systematic actions to murder millions of Jews. Today there is a memorial (Bikernieki - Forest of the Dead) at the mass graves in the Hochwald of Riga.

Bettina Goldberg, a historian from Flensburg, has written a detailed account of the events in her book "Abseits der Metropolen - die jüdische Minderheit in Schleswig-Holstein", published by Wachholtz Verlag in 2011. According to this, it can be assumed that Alice Spitz and her children perished in the shooting on 26.03.1942; possibly some of them had already perished earlier due to the miserable circumstances.

Handwritten notations in the birth certificates, made by the registry offices in Herten (for Alice Spitz), Barmen-Elberfeld (for Hans Georg), Wuppertal-Elberfeld (for Ines), Neumünster (for Egon and Bernd) and Hamburg (for Denny), show that all were declared dead. The Hamburg district court set 08 May 1945 as the time of death, for Denny the end of 1945.

When they died, Alice Spitz was 35 years old, the children were aged 12, 10, 8 and 3, and the youngest was barely half an year old. Stolpersteine have been laid in front of the house at Kieler Str. 21 for her and her children Hans Georg, Ines, Egon and Bernd, and a stone will also be laid for Denny. All names are listed in the Federal Book of Remembrance, the Hamburg Book of Remembrance and in Yad Vashem, Jerusalem (in each case in the Polish spelling of the name, Szpic).

Alice Spitz was a citizen of Neumünster, she was our neighbour! We do not know how her life would have turned out under different circumstances and what would have connected us to her today. But it is possible for us to remember her as a woman whose future was taken away from her and with it the opportunity to find a special and deserving place in the midst of society.

In memory of her and her children, the city of Neumünster has named a street after her in a new development area branching off from Rendsburger Straße in the Gartenstadt district.

The husband and father Jakob Spitz and the daughter Lea must always be included in this remembrance. Both survived and yet - in a different way - became victims of murderous National Socialism: 

Jakob Spitz arrived in Algeria in 1940 from France via Spain and Morocco, where he was taken in with other Polish and German Jews. He only learned of his family's fate after the end of the war. He married again in 1952, stayed in Algeria until 1962 and lived in France at the end. He died in Toulouse on 21.04.1967. His son Sammy Szpic (Polish spelling of the family name), who lived with his family near Toulouse, came from this second marriage. Some of the data included here and other documents on the fate of the family were provided by him. What happened to his first wife Alice and the children, as well as to his family of origin, weighed heavily on his father, and he was hardly able to speak or talk about it. Sammy Szpic is a half-brother of the murdered children.

Through Sammy Szpic, contact was made with his nephew Karl Goffe in England, the son of Lea Spitz. She came to England as a small child on a Kindertransport in 1939 and is the only surviving child of Alice and Jakob Spitz.   

We learn from Karl Goffe:

His mother Lea grew up with the pastor couple Algar in Norfolk.  The couple had no children of their own and brought Lea up in the Christian faith. She had done well and lived with them until her marriage in 1961. At that time, she had worked in a bakery and had met her husband Fred there. Two years later, he was born as their only child.

He does not know when Lea learned about the fate of her mother Alice and her siblings and thus also about her Jewish identity; she never really talked about it. He believes that question of "why me?"  (why did I survive!) traumatised her and that this had also been the cause of many hospital stays. It was sad that she could not or did not want to talk about this psychological burden. At some point, however, she had wanted to visit Israel, and in the early 1980s he and his parents had made this trip.

There had been contacts with her father Jakob (Jack); around 1955 he had visited her and the foster parents in England; in the 1960s they had visited her father and the family in Toulouse.

His mother had died on 26 August 2018 at the age of 81, seven years after his father's death. He only learned much about her from Sammy at her funeral.

It is worth remembering:

Rosa Minden stayed in Hamburg from about April 1942; her husband David Minden had died there in a Jewish hospital on 21.01.1942. Rosa Minden was deported from Hamburg to Auschwitz on 11.07.1942 and is considered lost there. There is a Stolperstein for her in front of the house at Kieler Straße 95. Six of the eleven children of David and Rosa Minden were murdered; five survived abroad. For Egon Minden, son of Rosa and David Minden and brother of Alice Spitz, there is a Stolperstein in front of the house at Wasbeker Straße 10.

Heide Winkler
Translator: Ingo Schumann
March 2021 / January 2022 / June 2023