EN

Goldine Fröhlich - Hartog

Goldine Hartog was a first cousin of Edith Frank-Holländer.

Person

Fotograaf onbekend. Afkomstig uit privécollectie van Curt H. Hartog
  • Goldine Fröhlich - Hartog
  • Born on: June 7, 1889
  • Born in: Haaren / Aachen, Duitsland
  • Died in: Moskou, USSR

Goldine Hartog

Fotograaf onbekend. Afkomstig uit privécollectie van Curt H. Hartog

Rechthebbende(n) onbekend

Goldine (Golda) Hartog was a daughter of Johanna Holländer, a sibling of Abraham Holländer, Edith's father. Johanna Holländer was married to butcher and cattle trader Albert Hartog.[1] Not only was Albert Hartog Abraham's brother-in-law, he was also his stepcousin. Gudula Mencken, second wife of Moses Hartog and Albert's stepmother, was a sister of Sara Mencken, Abraham's mother.[2]

Johanna and Albert had four children: Goldine, Emil, Martha and Eugen.[1] Little is known about the early life of eldest sibling Golda.[3] She lost her mother just five days before her fifth birthday and was raised by a stepmother who was also her aunt. Following Johanna's death in 1894, younger sister Eva moved in with Albert to care for his four motherless children. Albert and Eva married a year later and had seven more children together: Selma, Gustav, Meta, Bert, Curt, and twin daughters Ewalda and Johanna.[4] 

The life story of some of Meta's brothers and sisters is quite remarkable: they were active in the communist resistance against the nazis, for which they sometimes paid a high price. Four of the six sisters - Golda, Selma, Ewalda and Johanna - emigrated to the Sovjet-Union, where they suffered from the arbitrariness of Stalin's regime of terror. Three of the five brothers served in the German military during World War I. Emil served in the German Navy until the end of the war. Gustav and Eugen were called up for army service. Both of them were awarded military decorations: Gustav with the "Iron Cross 1st Class" (EK-I), Eugen with the "Iron Cross 2nd Class" (EK-II).[5]  Eugen was killed on the battlefield in August 1916. After an eventful life, Gustav was murdered in Auschwitz, as was his brother Emil.[6] 

Three out of the eleven siblings - Curt, Bert and Meta Hartog - emigrated to the United States before 1938. Meta became an opera singer at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Another sister, Martha, had moved to Budapest shortly before World War I. She started a family there and died in Hungary in 1995, 103 years of age.[7]

In 1914 or sooner, Golda started working as an accountant, fitst in Aachen, where she then still lived, next in Leipzig, and from 1916 till spring 1918 at Kaufhaus Tietz in Chemnitz. IN In Chemnitz she joined the Psartcus League,[8] the German left wing radical en communist-oriented organization, founded in 1915, with Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and Wilhelm Pieck as its principal foremen, which became part tof the newly founded Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD) in 1919.[9] She was also a member of the revolutionary Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat in Chemnitz.[10]

In September 1918 In September 1918, Ewalda, Selma, Meta and Johanna were brought to Chemnitz by their parents, where eldest sister Golda lived and worked. Albert and Eva feared for the grils'safety of the girls, as Allied troops began a rapid advance toward the German border. Golda then introduced her sisters to radical students and Russian Communists in exile. Once they returned to Aachen, Selma and Johanna joined the KPD.[11]

In 1922 Golda moved to Berlin to work for the Central Committee of the KPD. In 1923 she became a correspondent for the Deutsch-Russische Transport-Aktiengesellschaft (Derutra) and from October 1925 to July 1928 she worked for the USSR trade mission in Berlin. That work took her to Hanover, Nuremberg and Frankfurt am Main, where she probably met Horst Fröhlich, whom she married in 1924 or 1925.[8]

During World War I Horst Frölich had joined up with left-wing radicals in Bremen and afer the war he became an active member of the KPD in Bremen in 1919. In 1924 he became editor-in-chief of the communistis Arbeiter-Zeitung in Breslau; in 1929 editor of the Die Rote Fahne.[12] In 1931 Fröhlich left Germany and moved with his wife Golda to Russia, where they were both employed by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow. Frölich returned to Germany in 1934 in order to engage in illegal resistance work for the KPD there, but he was arrested on 7 March 1935, and sentenced to twelve years in prison in December 1936. Because he was Jewish, he was deported to Auschwitz in December 1942, where he was murdered on 4 January 1943, in Camp Golleschau, a sub-camp of Auschwitz.[12]

In 1932 Golda had become a member of the CPSU, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but she was thrown out of the party in November 1936 follwoing the arrest of her sister Johanna. Just like her siblings Golda and Selma, Johanne was an active member of the KPD. In 1929 she met and married Walter Wilke. Wilke worked for the regionale leadership of the KPD and because of this he was wanted by the authorities. Fearing imminent arrest, the couple emigrated to Moscow in 1931 with their son Hans Peter, followed by Johanna's twin sister Ewalda. All three of them found employment there, but in 1934 they were sent to Engels, capital city of the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.[13] In Engels Johanna worked as assistant director of the German publishing house until 1936. She was arrested after being denounced by a comrade for reading a book by Trotski. Johanna was sentenced to tien years in a penal camp, where het daughter Tamara was born. Following the arrest of his wife Johanna, by the end of 1936 Walter settled with his son in Frankreich, a small village in the canton of Pallasovka in the Volga Republic, where he worked as a teacher at an elementary school. In vain, he tried to travel to Spain in order to join the International Brigades as a volunteer. He was arrested on 10 February 1938 and sentenced to death by firing squad on 26 May 1938. The verdict was executed on 16 Juni 1938.[14] 

The indictment and judgment of sister Johanna caused the exclusion of Golda from the CPSU. One source claims that Golda was arrested in 1937,[11] but other sources contradict this and state that she was awarded Russian nationality in 1937, was employed as a teacher and later, from 1938 to 1939, as a proofreader in the prnting department of the publishinh house for foregn literature, and, in 1940 as librarian in the Lenin-library.[8] One of these sources also reports that she cared for Selma's son Eugen, while Selma was incarcerated.[15]

Selma Hartog and her second husband, Bernward Gabelin, were both active memmbers of the KPD in the 1920s and 1930s. Because life became to dangerous for them following the Nazi power takeover, they fled to Czsechosovakia in the spring of 1934, taking their son with them, but moved to the Soviet Union by the end of 1935, where they settled in Engels, the same city Johanna and Ewalda were sent to. In February 1938 Selma and her husband were arrested by the NKVD, the secret police.[16]

Golda's death in 1942 is the subject of several accounts. One report is that a friend saw Golda on the streets of Moscow in December 1941, bedraggled and in a state of confusion. Shortly thereafter, she was reportedly put on a train to Tashkent to be placed in a home for emigrants. Other sources report that she was found dead on the streets of Moscow in late December 1942 or early 1943 by Eugen, Selma's son.

Selma Hartog and Bernward Gabelin belolonged to the few arrested Germans who were released in the spring of 1939. Selma served in the Red Army until 1945, Bernward was employed as a political instructor in a camp for German prisoners of war until 1943, after that as an editor in Moscow. In 1946, both of them returned to Germany Duitsland eand settled in East Berlinn. Selma’s siblings Ewalda and Johanna returned from Russia eventually. Johanna and her son and daughter were not allowed to leave the USSR until 1958 (after having been rehabilitated by the Soviet-Russian authorities), after which she joined Selma in the GDR.[17] Selma, Ewalda and Johanna lived in East Bertin till the end of their days, as did their mother Eva. Having succesfully emigrated to the United States in Januaryi 1939, assisted by her children already living there, in 1949 she returned to Germany, where she settled in East Berlin, enjoying the company of her three daughters.

The Otto Frank Archive contains correspondence of Selma Gabelin-Hartog with Otto Frank.[18]

Bron persoonsgegevens.[8]

Footnotes

  1. a, b Familienbuch Euregio: Johanna Holländer.
  2. ^ Familienbuch Euregio: Moses Hartog.
  3. ^ Biographical details about her leife can be found in the portrait of Golda Hartog by Curt H. Hartog on the website of the Gedenkbuchprojekt für die Opfer der Shoah aus Aachen e.V. 2002-2020. Also see: Stefan Kahlen, Die spannende Genealogie der jüdischen Familie Hartog aus dem Rheinland, Website Hans-Dieter Arntz, 3 juni 2014.
  4. ^ Familienbuch Euregio: Eva Holländer.
  5. ^ The Iron Cross was awarded for bravery in battle as well as other military contributions in a battlefield environment. The Iron Cross, 1st class, and the Iron Cross, 2nd class, were awarded without regard to rank. One had to possess the 2nd Class already in order to receive the 1st Class (though in some cases both could be awarded simultaneously). Wikipedia: Iron Cross.
  6. ^ See the portraits of Emil Hartog and Gustav Hartog by Curt H. Hartog on the website of the Gedenkbuchprojekt für die Opfer der Shoah aus Aachen e.V. 2002-2020. Also see: Kahlen, Die spannende Genealogie der jüdischen Familie Hartog aus dem Rheinland.
  7. ^ Kahlen, Die spannende Genealogie der jüdischen Familie Hartog aus dem Rheinland.
  8. a, b, c, d Familienbuch Euregio: Goldine Hartog; Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur, Biographische Angaben aus dem Handbuch der Deutschen Kommunisten: Golda Frölich geborene Hartog
  9. ^ Wikipedia: Spartacus League.
  10. ^ The Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte, or Workers' and soldiers' councils of 1918–1919 were short-lived revolutionary bodies that spread the German Revolution to cities across the German Empire during the final days of World War I. Wikipedia: German workers' and soldiers' councils 1918–1919.
  11. a, b Curt H. Hartog, Golda Frölich geborene Hartog.
  12. a, b Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur, Biographische Angaben aus dem Handbuch der Deutschen Kommunisten: Fröhlich, Horst.
  13. ^ In 1924, the Volga-German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was established, after the area was granted autonomy following the October Revolution of  1918. The republic, which was abolished in 1941, had about 600,000 inhabitants, about two-thirds of whom were of German descent. Wikipedia: Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.
  14. ^ Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur, Biographische Angaben aus dem Handbuch der Deutschen Kommunisten: Wilke, Walter.
  15. ^ Familienbuch Euregio: Selma Hartog.
  16. ^ Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur, Biographische Angaben aus dem Handbuch der Deutschen Kommunisten: Gabelin, Bernward (Franz).
  17. ^ Anne Frank Stichting (AFS), Anne Frank Collectie (AFC), Otto Frank Archief, reg. nr. OFA_73.3: Selma Gabelin-Hartog aan Otto Frank, 17 maart 1958.
  18. ^ AFS, AFC, reg. nr. OFA_73.3: Correspondentie van Selma Gabelin-Hartog met Otto Frank, 1957-1970.