Many people have crossed the doorstep of this old Berlin apartment located on the fourth floor. Here at 40 Rosenheimer Street they were sitting on the sofa and at the kitchen table, here they were looking out the window, here they were dreaming their dreams.
Marie Rolshoven has lived here with her family since 2007. “The feeling you get when you cross the threshold that the previous residents crossed for the last time never leaves you,” says Marie. She knows very well: Jews lived here in the past and none of them survived the Nazi era.
They were expelled from their homes
After the Nazis seized power in January 1933 it quickly became clear that Jews in Hitler's Germany were considered "second-class citizens." The right to housing is no longer self-evident.
The newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, the mouthpiece of the Nazi Party, wrote on September 18, 1938, that “a citizen conscious of his ethnicity cannot be asked to share housing with a Jew,” and therefore terminating the lease with immediate effect was a legal procedure. On April 30, 1939, a law was issued in this regard obligating Jewish tenants and owners to vacate their homes and move to buildings designated by the authorities, which in Nazi terminology were called “Jewish homes.”
Several people were forced to live in the apartment of Heini and Karl Müller at No. 40 Rosenheimerstrasse. In the end, their number reached nine people. In the fall of 1941, deportations to extermination camps began.
Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister under Adolf Hitler, wrote in his diary: “The essential thing is that the capital of the Reich be free of Jews, and I will not rest nor rest until this goal is completely achieved.” Residents of Rosenheimer Street were also deported.
"Remember on the spot"
These are the people Marie Rolshoven would like to remind people of. That's why in 2016, she and her mother, who have since died, and a friend founded the Denk Mal Am Ort initiative, inspired by the Open Jewish Homes project in Amsterdam.
The idea behind this is to invite people to the place where daily life took place then. “You get a lot closer to those people by being in the real place; it's very different from visiting a memorial site,” Rolshoven says. "It's different from going to a memorial," she adds.
"This is where my brother's bed once was."
Her neighbors who live on the lower two floors had the same experience; The "Denk Mal Am Ort" initiative revealed that the Jewish family of Ludwig Katsnallenbogen had once rented the apartment.
The family left Nazi Germany in 1939 at the last minute. "Then in 2018, 92-year-old Joel Ludwig Katsnallenbogen, accompanied by his daughter, son-in-law and grandson, returned to this place in response to our invitation," Rolshoven told DW.
The initiative found him via Facebook. Rolshoven recounts the impact the former resident's entry had on visitors when he said: "Yes, I remember perfectly. Here stood my brother's bed. He was ten years old when we had to leave the country."
Soon there will be no eyewitnesses left
Joel Ludwig Katsnallenbogen subsequently died, as did many eyewitnesses. So remembering events across generations becomes more important, Rolshoven says. She herself welcomed into her home one of the grandchildren of one of the previous residents.
Claudia Samter's mother was able to escape from Berlin to Argentina one day, while her aunt was unable to do so. She asked the Denk Mal Am Ort initiative to help search for traces of the past, and it turned out that her aunt had previously lived in the Rolshofen apartment.
Claudia Samter has already visited Rolshoven twice. “There's no grave in a cemetery that she can visit,” Rolshoven says. She added, "We sat at the kitchen table and talked about life today and tomorrow. We laughed a lot and cried as well. It was good to revive this place again in this way."
In 2026, the Denk Mal Am Ort initiative organized a commemorative event in eight cities. Many young grandchildren attended, Rolshoven said; “It helped them to know that they stood on that stairwell and touched the same doorknob.”
Searching for traces of ancestors
Adam Ethan Klein, 19, from Switzerland also wanted to know more about his ancestral history. “I always knew there was an escape story, but this was never an important topic at home,” he says.
"They would tell me: 'Yes, your grandparents left Germany in 1938. Just in time. Fortunately, otherwise you wouldn't be here today.'"
Adam says that he began to research and investigate more deeply due to the spread of anti-Semitism, and to the widespread slogan “Never Again” (a call to take an active stance today against anti-Semitism, hatred, and attacks on democracy - editor’s note).
The whole family knew that there was a bag belonging to his great-grandfather (on his maternal side) on the floor of the ceiling, “but no one ever dared to say: ‘Let’s take a look at it’.”
Until Adam opened the bag and found dozens of documents, including a letter from the Hanover District Court, dated June 12, 1933, and addressed to lawyer Max Haas, who was his great-great-grandfather.
“In the eyes of others, they are no longer just one thing: Jews.”
The letter Adam found said: “Today you have been removed from the list of licensed lawyers pursuant to a decree issued by the Minister of Justice.”
Adam was deeply shocked: “With that single phrase, the families were made unequivocally understood that they had never been what they had sought for generations: an ordinary German family. From that moment on, they were only one thing in the eyes of others: Jews.”
This was an uncomfortable realization for Adam. As well as the news that someone stabbed an ultra-Orthodox Jew in Zurich while chanting anti-Semitic slogans.
The attack occurred close to the synagogue where one of his cousins had just celebrated the bar mitzvah. (In Judaism, the term “bar mitzvah” refers to the celebration of a boy’s reaching the age of religious obligation - editor’s note.)
"Things like this don't happen in Switzerland."
“For the first time in my life, I had a disturbing feeling that I did not quite belong here, even though Zurich was my homeland, and the city in which I had lived a comfortable life since I was born as a Swiss Jew.” This is what Adam later wrote down.
"This was something new for me. I always thought that things like this didn't happen in Switzerland. Maybe it was a bit of ignorance on my part," he says.
This topic never leaves his mind. Adam continues his research and wants to write his final high school thesis about his relatives. In the spring of 2024, he sets out with his parents, sister, grandmother, uncles, aunts, and seven cousins to learn about the places of origin of their ancestors.
An unusual meeting
At some point they too stand in front of a five-storey building at Hölderlinstrasse 55. Suddenly a man emerges on his bicycle from the entrance to the courtyard.
“So, are you taking a tourist tour of the city or do you intend to move here?” he asked jokingly. It is Thomas Koch who has been conducting research for a long time to find out who lived in his house before. When the reply came: “No, we are looking at the places where our ancestors lived,” he became very excited.
Koch had already discovered that the house's previous owners, the Merzbacher brothers, sold the house in 1936 for 75,000 Imperial Marks. They had to pay 70,000 Reichsmarks as wealth taxes and to escape the country. The remaining amount was barely enough for ship tickets to Brazil and the United States. Since 1939 their traces have been lost and Koch has not found any further documents. So he asked, “Are you the Hersheimers?”
Indeed, they were the intended family. Koch describes that encounter as "magical"; Adolf and August Herzheimer represented the fourth generation of Adam's ancestors (his great-grandparents) and their daughter Else was married to Max Haase.
The Herzheimer family, a plywood business, lived on the ground floor in 1937 and 1938 before they were forcibly removed to a “home for the Jews.” Max Haase, Adam's great-grandfather, was married to Ilse, the daughter of Stuttgart residents Adolf and August Herzheimer.
Adam Klein and Thomas Koch keep in touch. The next time the young man visits Stuttgart, the Koch family invites him for coffee and cake.
“Nice apartment,” says Adam. "It was interesting to imagine how my ancestors lived there in the past and that life probably wasn't that different. It's possible that coffee and cake were around at that time too."
Adolf and August Hirschheimer lived with their daughter Ilse where Thomas Koch now resides. Adam shows a resident of Stuttgart pictures of his grandmother Else, who got married in the synagogue in Stuttgart and was standing in the living room wearing her wedding clothes. “In front of the door that we still have,” Koch says.
“It was really moving to find new roommates in such a distant historical context. And I think this experience, this understanding, is a highly empathic process that connects us simply through this apartment.”
Torn identities and separation from the roots
Ilse and Max Haase find refuge in England, while the Hirschheimers emigrate to Switzerland in 1939. Adolf Hirschheimer died in 1940 of a heart condition, but “certainly also of a broken heart,” believes Adam, his great-great-great-grandson.
Max summons her son-in-law Auguste to England. The family feels homesick: “There we were the Jews, here we were the Germans. Try to adapt to this situation,” Else Haase wrote to a friend. These lines are the ones that Adam chose as the title of his final message.
His ancestors did not find comfort after their homeland was taken from them. From England they eventually moved to Israel and then at some point back to Europe to Switzerland.
“My grandparents settled at the end of their lives just a two-hour drive from their ancient homeland,” Adam writes. “When I look at their biographies from the perspective of their grandson, it becomes clear to me that after separating from Germany, they were never able to put down roots anywhere else.”
“Remembering is important because in the end we must learn from history,” Adam says. “I believe that everyone has a duty, and that they can make an impact through active remembering. And so we hope it will continue even in the absence of eyewitnesses.” For example, in the apartment that his ancestors previously lived in.
Prepared in Arabic by: M.A.M (A.J.M.)
