Family Franz Ledermann part 3

In the first two parts of this history of the Ledermann family, the family’s centre of life moved from Ostrowo in Posen—where the grandfather Gerson Ledermann had been born in 1809—to Breslau in Silesia; and only the next generation, the children of Benjamin Benno Ledermann, who died in Breslau in 1911, and his wife Lucie, née Schachtel, came to Berlin at the beginning of the 20th century. The first and eldest of these children is Curt Otto Ledermann.

The brother: Curt Otto Ledermann.

Children, even more than wives, remain publicly invisible until they reach legal adulthood (in Prussia at that time, 24 years), with the exception of pupils completing their Abitur, whose graduation was listed in the annual school reports that schools were required to publish. Curt Ledermann, who was born on 18 August 1879 in Beuthen (Upper Silesia), passed his Abitur at Easter 1898 at the Royal Protestant Gymnasium in Hirschberg, after a total of 10 school years and 2 years in the Prima. He was evidently not a particularly good student: according to the school-leaving certificate he had to present in Rostock, he achieved “good” in Latin and “satisfactory” in all other subjects.
He did not have to complete military service afterwards: although there was general conscription, after the Peace of Versailles at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71, the size of the standing army was set at a peacetime strength of about 400,000 (for 1881)—but this number did not include the so-called one-year volunteers who had completed higher education. “Yet the rapidly growing population after 1871 meant that between the founding of the Empire and the beginning of the First World War only 63% of conscripted men were actually called to the colours”. Jewish students traditionally could not enter the army because they could not become officers: “During the Kaiserreich there were no active Jewish officers in the Prussian army, and after 1885 no Jewish reserve officers either”. This changed only with the First World War.
Curt Ledermann could therefore begin studying law immediately after completing his Abitur. While his father had begun and finished his studies in Breslau without ever leaving Silesia, Curt allowed himself the freedom to attend other universities and learn from the professors there. According to the details in his handwritten CV submitted for his doctorate (see below), he studied for one semester in Freiburg im Breisgau (summer semester—SS—1898), for two semesters (winter semester 1898/99 and summer semester 1899) at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and for three semesters in Breslau (winter semester 1899/1900 to winter semester 1900/1901). There he took the first state examination in law at the Royal Higher Regional Court in Breslau on 14 January 1901, and on 22 June 1901 he was appointed Referendar and assigned for nine months to the district court of Wüstegiersdorf in Lower Silesia (today: Gluszyca, Poland).
On 31 January 1902 he was awarded a doctorate in law (Dr. jur.) by the Faculty of Law at the University of Rostock (image 3). His dissertation was entitled: “In what respect do the provisions of the Civil Code concerning the right of the possessor to compensation for expenditures (§ 994 ff.) differ from the provisions of the Corpus Juris Civilis?”. In other words, it compared the civil law in force in Prussia with the provisions of ancient Roman law. We were unable to determine why he went to Rostock for this and did not complete his doctorate in Breslau; it is not even clear whether he had to go to Rostock at all—except, of course, for the final doctoral examination on 25 January 1902 (Rigorosum).
It may have had something to do with his love for the Latin language. At least one clue lies in the fact that the dissertation report in Rostock was written by Professor Franz Bernhöft (1852–1933), a recognized expert on Roman law who served as full professor of civil and Roman law in Rostock from 1877 to 1922. Presumably—but this is speculation—it was as in real life: he knew a professor in Breslau who told him that with such a topic (a comparison of Roman law and the Civil Code on a specific legal issue) he would do best to go to Bernhöft in Rostock, possibly a former student of Bernhöft’s … perhaps also a confidential message to Bernhöft that does not appear in the files … The university archive in Rostock informed us upon inquiry that not all correspondence was preserved.
We currently know little about his further stages of training during his Referendariat and as Assessor, but in the 1905 address book of Beuthen he is still listed as a judicial Referendar. Thanks to an article in the journal of the Berlin Bar Association, we know that he had established himself as an attorney in Berlin from 1907 onward. According to the Berlin address books from 1908 to 1912, he lived and worked at Zimmerstrasse 21 and was admitted to practice before the Regional Court I in 1910. From 1913 until his early death in 1918 he lived in the front building at Kochstrasse 49.

Normally, one learns little to nothing about the work of lawyers—particularly about their legal cases—because they are bound by confidentiality, similar to physicians, unless these cases touch on public interests and appear in press releases, official notes, or even articles and books. We found two such reports concerning Curt Ledermann’s professional activity: in 1913 he represented a Berlin merchant in a legal dispute before the Mannheim district court concerning five due bills of exchange, and he was one of two defense attorneys for a young woman accused of murdering a friend by shooting him in the Berlin Tiergarten. She insisted, however, that he had shot himself twice in the back of the head—a case before the jury court of the Berlin Regional Court I with rather grotesque features, described in great detail in a book chapter. It is possible that he was appointed as court-assigned defense counsel in the latter case.
Even without the one-year military service, he was of course recruited into the army at the beginning of the First World War in 1914, but due to his lack of military training he became—at the age of 35—“only” a private in the 4th Company of the “Garde-Grenadier Regiment No. 3 (Regiment Elisabeth).” Where and for how long he was involved in combat could not be determined, but he fell ill during his service and died “after prolonged suffering” shortly before the end of the war, on 21 September 1918, at the Hansa Sanatorium (Lessingstrasse 46 in the Hansa Quarter).

Unusually, his death was recorded in two civil registry certificates. On the one hand, “the children’s nurse Agnes Neumann,” possibly an employee or volunteer at the Hansa Clinic, reported his death to Registry Office Berlin XIIa (Moabit), and on the same day the Reserve Battalion of the Garde-Grenadier Regiment No. 3 reported his death to Registry Office Berlin I/II (Mitte). Neither certificate contains any indication of his cause of death.
In an article titled “Die Berliner Anwaltschaft im Ersten Weltkrieg” from 2014 (5), it is stated that his death resulted from an injury sustained during the war, and in a family death notice in the Berliner Tagblatt of 24 September 1918 it states that he died “after long and severe suffering.” He was buried in Hirschberg.

The notice was placed by his closest relatives, but it indirectly points to further kinship: he was not a “nephew,” i.e., the siblings of his mother—if there were any—and of his father were no longer alive in 1918. But their children are cousins of Curt—vice versa—who survived the war and may still have descendants today. To verify this, another search on Ancestry was necessary the couple Philipp Mahn and his wife Cäcilie, née Ledermann, had three sons: Eugen, born 4 February 1871, who died in Manchester, England, in 1958; Löbel Ludwig, born 25 August 1872, who emigrated to Israel in 1939; and Max Bruno, born 27 January 1878, who married Franziska Käthe Lichtenstein in Berlin.
Thus, the Ledermann family still has possible living relatives from the period before the Second World War who escaped the Holocaust by emigrating in time.