Family Franz Ledermann part 4

Käthe Kaempfer, née Ledermann, was the first member of the Ledermann family to settle in the Lützow Quarter, even before her brother Franz, although he came to Berlin earlier. Since the family, following Käthe and her husband Felix, used the spelling Kaempfer, this spelling will be used consistently here, even though some documents use the spelling “Kämpfer.”

The sister: Hedwig Käthe Kaempfer, née Ledermann.

Käthe Ledermann was born on 25 March 1881 in Königshütte (Upper Silesia; today Chorzów, Poland). Although school attendance was by then compulsory for girls as well, we have no record of any formal training—her marriage certificate from Hirschberg simply states “without profession.” She married the lawyer Dr. Felix Kaempfer from Posen on 1 February 1903 in Hirschberg. The couple had two children: Heinz Martin, born 20 April 1904, and Otto Hans, born 18 September 1906, both in Posen. The younger son, Otto, died on 19 October 1918 “in his 13th year after a severe illness” (Posener Tageblatt, notice of 20 October 1918); the cause of death could not be determined.

The brother-in-law: Lawyer Dr. Felix Kaempfer.

Felix Kaempfer was born in Posen on 29 May 1869, the son of Paul Peretz Kaempfer (1836–1919) and his wife Pauline, née Gensler (1840–1891).
Felix also had an older brother, Gustav, born 28 August 1864, likewise in Posen, who moved to Berlin as early as 1884 and learned a trade here: he presumably apprenticed with an uncle of the same name and became a decorator and upholsterer (Alte Jacobstr. 56). After the First World War he lost his profession and worked as a street cleaner (1920). We can only surmise that after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 he was deported and murdered—his nephew Heinz Kaempfer submitted a compensation claim to that effect in 1962. A French website provides information on the broader genealogy of the Jewish Kaempfer family.
Unlike his brother—but like his two brothers-in-law—Felix studied law, though he remained in Berlin for his entire course of study. He enrolled at the Friedrich Wilhelm University on 26 October 1886, having passed his Abitur in the autumn of 1886 at the Gymnasium in Posen. His studies lasted from the winter semester 1886/87 through the winter semester 1888/89; during this time he had, according to the matriculation register, four different addresses in Berlin. On 15 January 1889 he deregistered (exmatriculated).

According to the university archive, he did not earn his doctorate in Berlin, so we can only establish that he received his doctorate at another university—for example, in Breslau—though Breslau matriculation records are not digitally available. It is also unclear when he was awarded the title Justizrat; ordinarily this occurred no earlier than 25 years after the beginning of professional practice, or on the basis of particular public merit.

According to his brother-in-law Franz Ledermann, in a biographical statement, the lawyer and Justizrat Dr. Felix Kaempfer had to leave Posen in 1920 “because of his German convictions” and settled in Berlin. Here he was still admitted to practice before Regional Courts I to III, but he died shortly thereafter.

Posen had been annexed by Prussia in 1793 in the course of the Third Partition of Poland, a division confirmed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, but this did not change the fact that Poland was predominantly Catholic, and the Protestant Prussians—being in the minority—were regarded as an occupying force. Prussia reinforced this impression by appointing Herr Flottwell as the senior president of the province and by rigorously enforcing his policies. Since the Jews of Posen gained formal civil equality under this policy (based on the 1812 edict), they were pro-German, which made them an irritant to the Poles. This came back to haunt them when, after the First World War, Posen once again became part of Poland: “In January 1919 the internments began. Leading figures in commerce, the judiciary, and the administration were taken into protective custody, including some Jewish men … Jews, whether nationally German or nationally Jewish, were interned primarily in order to deprive them of their economic positions … In this way it was intended to drive out the Jews, who made up about 15% of the population …” .

From his obituaries we learn that Felix Kaempfer died “after long and severe suffering”—the “Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith” expressed condolences, as did the “Association for Liberal Judaism in Germany”. And even ten years later, on the occasion of the 70th birthday of his friend and law-firm partner, Justizrat Michael Placzek, he was remembered. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery Berlin-Weissensee.

The Nephew: Heinz Kaempfer.

Heinz, the elder son of Felix and Käthe Kaempfer, moved with his parents to Berlin in 1920 and continued his schooling there; he took his Abitur at Easter 1922 at the Prinz-Heinrich-Gymnasium and subsequently intended to become a merchant—though what he did and where he worked in the following years has so far not been determined.

The family lived at Potsdamer Straße 109 and remained there even after the death of Felix Kaempfer. They are listed at this address in the address book until 1930, and also in the Jewish address book of 1931–32. They evidently maintained close contact with the family of Franz Ledermann, who likewise had moved to Berlin in 1918: Sister Käthe Kaempfer was one of the witnesses at his wedding in 1924, and she was the most frequent listener at the Ledermann house concerts, up to the last concert in Berlin on 29 April 1933. However, Käthe Kaempfer and her son Heinz did not emigrate together with the family of Franz Ledermann to the Netherlands, as we had long assumed; instead, they remained in Berlin. According to the address book, Käthe lived from 1931 to 1939 in Schöneberg (Kufsteiner Straße 18).

On 4 June 1936, Heinz married Eva Susanne Wrzeszinski in Berlin-Dahlem (born in Berlin on 16 February 1914), daughter of the well-known Berlin lawyer Dr. Richard Wrzeszinski from Breslau, who in 1913 had married Elisabeth Auguste Kaiser in Berlin. He died on 8 January 1934 in Berlin (5), leaving behind his widow and three children: in addition to Eva, he had two sons (Gunther Wilhelm, born 11 September 1916, and Reinhard David, born 15 January 1925), both of whom emigrated to England and there changed their surname to Wendon.
The widows Kaempfer and Wrzeszinski served as witnesses at the wedding of Heinz and Eva. According to Eva, the couple emigrated to the Netherlands in 1936, while Heinz’s mother did not leave Germany until 1939; the whereabouts of Eva’s mother are currently unclear. On the marriage certificate of Heinz and Eva, his residence is given as The Hague (Sijzenlaan 55E) and his occupation as merchant, so he must at least have been in the Netherlands beforehand in order to submit the required registration certificate at the wedding. Heinz and Eva had two sons, whose identities are not mentioned here for reasons of data protection.

After the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940, Käthe—like her brother Franz and his family—was deported to Westerbork, a transit camp, and from there to Auschwitz, where she was murdered on 17 November 1943.

A French website reported that Heinz Kaempfer died in 1986 in The Hague, Netherlands. The year of death, together with the information about the city in which he lived, made further research possible. Dutch municipal archives are excellently digitized, so it was easy to find his residential address for the years 1940 to 1945, to trace the search for surviving relatives after the war, and to reconstruct at least a small part of his life: In the years after the war, Heinz Kaempfer was active in the “Society for Japanese Art”, founded in 1937. In 1949, the society had only 48 members, but today it has more than 500 members worldwide; he served as its secretary and also as chairman of the board. The society honored him on his 75th birthday in 1979 with a commemorative publication, and posthumously in 1989 by naming a scholarship program after him—the “Heinz Kaempfer Fund”, which has been awarding grants and prizes since 1990. In a special issue of the society’s journal published for the celebration of his 100th birthday in 2005, his son recounts a few biographical details, but especially how his love of Japanese art began—namely in an art gallery at Pariser Platz in Berlin. In 1931, a major exhibition of Japanese art took place in Berlin, which may well have provided the framework for this “love at first sight.”

Finally: In the Berlin State Archive are stored the files of the restitution claims that Eva and Heinz Kaempfer submitted in the 1950s and 1960s for the material losses suffered by their respective Berlin families—hopefully not in vain.