Martha Goldberg, née Sussmann (4 August 1873 – 10 November 1938) was a German woman and social activist, and one of five Jewish victims murdered by National Socialists in Bremen and the surrounding area during Reichspogromnacht. She was married to Dr Adolph Goldberg, also Jewish, whose practice was based in Burgdamm. Martha Goldberg was well respected due to her social conscience. For more than four decades she supported fellow citizens who were in need in a variety of ways, particularly those she encountered through her husband's medical practice. She and her husband were killed by a member of the Sturmabteilung.
Although the circumstances of her murder and its legal treatment in both the Nazi era and post-war period are documented in preserved trial records, the process of accounting for her personal fate did not begin until the 1980s. In Bremen, tributes to those murdered include the naming of a public square after the Goldbergs, and the naming of a nursery after Martha Goldberg.
Life Up to 1933
Martha Sussmann was the daughter of affluent businessman Adolph Sussmann and his wife Bertha, née Ahrens. She was born in Schwerin in 1873. In 1895 she married the doctor Adolph Goldberg (also Adolf Goldberg; 1860–1938), from Soltau, and moved with him to the municipality of Lesum (part of Bremen since 1939). From 1888, her husband ran a doctor's practice there, in the district Burgdamm, in which Martha Goldberg worked as a receptionist, secretary and book-keeper.Rolf Rübsam: Sie lebten unter uns. Bremen 1988, S. 15–22. (Anmerkung: Rolf Rübsam wertete für sein Buch unter anderem Zeitzeugenberichte aus, die 1985 im Rahmen eines heimatgeschichtlichen Forschungsprojekts des Schulverbunds Lesum eingeholt wurden.)
From the turn of the century, the Goldbergs supported people in their area who were in social need through various personal initiatives and using their own resources. Martha Goldberg was considered an "extraordinarily open-minded, active, generous and caring woman". She often accompanied her husband on house calls – he was also known as an experienced obstetrician – and tried to improve the circumstances of patients in need. Among other things, she provided them with warm meals made in her household, helped in later years by her daughter Käthe as a young adult. Through her engagement with social issues, she contributed significantly to her husband's success as a doctor. The Goldbergs were "remarkably highly regarded", and were both prominent figures in the region Burg-Lesum, where they were active members of the community.
True to her patriotic convictions, during the First World War Martha Goldberg supported an appeal for donations by the Flottenbundes Deutscher Frauen (a women's union in support of the German navy) for the districts of Vegesack and Kreis Blumenthal. Towards the end of the war and in the year 1919, she was involved in a relief initiative by the Vaterländischen Frauenverein (Patriotic Women's Association), in which food was distributed, primarily to malnourished children.
In Lesum at that time, poverty was widespread, particularly in families with many children. The primary employer was the Bremer Woll-Wäscherei (Bremen Wool Laundry), founded in 1872/73 and located opposite Burg station, which was bought up by the Bremer Woll-Kämmerei and decommissioned in 1927. Towards the end of the Weimar Republic, during the period of mass unemployment which followed the crash of 1929, her husband became known entirely as a doctor for the poor and Martha Goldberg started up her "private social care" and her "soup kitchen" again.
Martha and Adolph Goldberg had three children, born towards the end of the 1890s: the first born was daughter Getrud, followed by slightly younger twins Käthe and Kurt. The siblings had a happy childhood and youth in Burgdamm. Dokumentation des heimatgeschichtlichen Forschungsprojekts des Schulverbunds Lesum, das unter Leitung des Lehrers Rolf Rübsam 1985 durchgeführt wurde. The family belonged to an affluent, bourgeois social class; they had many different social contacts and often traveled; they employed domestic staff such as a housemaid and a nanny, and the children received private tuition at home.Rolf Rübsam: Sie lebten unter uns. Bremen 1988, S. 40–45.
Under National Socialism In Bremen and the surrounding area, as in the whole of the Third Reich, Jews were persecuted and discriminated against during the National Socialist era. After the NSDAP came into power in 1933 and after the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, the Goldbergs fell into increasing and in the end total isolation within their living and social environment. As early as 1934, their number of patients had already begun to decrease significantly, although reasons of age also played a role in this. In 1938, Adolph Goldberg lost his medical license according to the "Fourth Decree of the Reich Citizens Act", and had to close his practice. Martha and Adolph Goldberg avoided contact with their friends and acquaintances so that they did not make them "undesirable" or "punishable".Rolf Rübsam: Sie lebten unter uns. Bremen 1988, S. 45–50, 74.
In addition, their family situation changed radically during this period of discrimination and persecution of Jews: their son, Kurt, committed suicide. Their oldest daughter, Gertrud, emigrated to Montevideo in Uruguay with her husband, Hans Friedheim, a textile merchant from Nienburg/Weser. Käthe, who had become a nurse due to the influence of her parents, emigrated to South Africa in the autumn of 1937.
November Pogrom and murder There were multiple National Socialist organizations in Bremen, as in the rest of the Third Reich. To begin with, acts of violence were largely perpetrated by the Sturmabteilung (SA). The SA in Bremen was under the control of the SA group "Nordsee", which was originally based in Hannover and after 1933 had various posts in Bremen, latterly at 75 Hollerallee (now Forum Kirche of the Bremen Evangelical Church). From 1935, the regional SA group was led by Heinrich Böhmcker, who was also the mayor of Bremen. In Munich on the evening of 9 November 1938, Böhmcker attended a meeting of SA leaders in which Hitler and his propaganda minister Goebbels incited Germany-wide acts of terror against Jews: the so-called November Pogrom, which is still generally referred to by the now increasingly controversial term "Kristallnacht". Medieninstallation BEFEHLEN GEHORCHEN TÖTEN, 9. November 2008
After an inflammatory speech by Goebbels, the attending Gauleiter and SA leaders gave their local duty offices commands according to this speech. Böhmcker also telephoned his staff office in Bremen: synagogues should be set on fire and businesses with Jewish owners should be destroyed. Word-for-word: "All Jews must be disarmed. If they resist, do not hesitate to shoot them down". As a result of this, during that same night the bicycle dealer Selma Zweinicki and the businessman Heinrich Rosenblum were killed in the Bremen area of Neustadt.
The terror order was passed from Bremen to Geestemünde, and from there, via Walter Seggermann, to the SA commanders Ernst Röschmann and Fritz Köster in a stronger form: "Red alert for the SA across the whole of Germany. [...] When evening comes, there can be no more Jews in Germany. Jewish business must also be destroyed." Köster, who was also the mayor of Lesum, reacted in surprise: "What is actually supposed to happen to the Jews?" – "Annihilate!". Röschmann reassured himself of this with a call to the SA group "Nordsee" in Bremen, in which the plan was confirmed.
Fritz Köster subsequently gave the command to shoot Adolph and Martha Goldberg in Burgdamm and the mechanic Leopold Sinasohn in the neighboring rural community Platjenwerbe, which is now a part of Ritterhude. All three were murdered in the night on 10 November 1938. The Goldbergs were "woken abruptly at 5 in the morning on 10 November" by an SA Scharführer unknown to them, August Frühling, and "shot and killed in their living room".Ulrike Puvogel u. a. (Hrsg.): Gedenkstätten für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus. Eine Dokumentation, Band 1. 2., überarb. und erw. Aufl., Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, Bonn 1995, , S. 209. Frühling was a member of the Lesum SA unit Reservesturm 29/411 under the command of the SA Obersturmführer Friedrich Jahns, who assisted in the killing of Martha and Adolph Goldberg.Wilhelm Lührs: Das Pogrom vom 9./10. November 1938. In: „Reichskristallnacht“ in Bremen. Bremen 1988, S. 56, 58.
Martha and Adolph Goldberg were buried in the Jewish cemetery in Ritterhude.Rolf Rübsam: Sie lebten unter uns. Bremen 1988, S. 81–84.
Legal proceedings The circumstances of the crime were not investigated by the public prosecutor, but rather by the NSDAP Supreme Party Court Special Division 6 (Sondersenat Nr. 6 des Obersten Parteigerichts der NSDAP). It was reported to be the "mood" of those involved that "the time for the full solution to the Jewish question was deemed to have come, and the few hours remaining before the following day had to be put to use".Susanne Heim (Bearb.): Deutsches Reich: 1938 – August 1939. Band 2 von: Götz Aly (Hrsg.): Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945. R. Oldenbourg Verlag, München 2009, , S. 391 (Dokument 134). It was said that the men had acted in the certainty that such orders were only given in agreement with the highest places. Thus justified, the party court proceedings against the SA members and "fellow party members" August Frühling and those who gave his orders were dropped on 20 January 1939.
On 13 February, the highest party judge Walter Buch requested the Führer Adolf Hitler to quash the proceedings before the criminal courts: according to a determination by the Supreme Party Court, during the so-called "time of the struggle" it was common practice that the party leaders made some orders deliberately unclear, in order to remain in the background as the organizers of a particular operation. For active National Socialists, he argued, it was still normal to read more into an order than was actually said. "Improper motives" could not be established, and "those party members who overstepped the mark due to proper National Socialist belief and readiness for action should be protected".International Military Tribunal: Der Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Militärgerichtshof. Teil 2: Urkunden und anderes Beweismaterial. Dt. Ausg., Nachdr. der Ausg. Nürnberg 1948, Delphin-Verlag, München 1989, , Bd. XXXII, PS-3063, S. 20f, Zitatstelle S. 28.
August Frühling (1885–1966), the perpetrator, had been a ship's engineer. He was at sea from 1908 on, served in the First World War with the German Imperial Navy, and after 1920 worked as a mechanical engineer and operations manager for various companies, or was unemployed. Frühling joined the SA in 1933 and the NSDAP in 1937, and in 1938 was appointed SA Scharführer. The man who passed him his orders, Fritz Johann Köster (1906–1993), started out as a business clerk, joined the SA in 1932 and the NSDAP in 1933, was mayor of Lesum from 1834 to 1939, and then worked in the Bremen administration. From 1943 on, Köster was a senior civil servant, and finally a representative of the Bremen Construction Senator, and in 1944 he was appointed SS Obersturmbannführer. The man who gave Frühling his direct orders and his accomplice, Fredrich Jahns (1885–1939) was a master gardener, member of the SA and Obersturmführer for the SA Reservesturms 29/411 Lesum-Ritterhude. He died in 1939.Susanne Heim (Bearb.): Deutsches Reich: 1938 – August 1939. Band 2 von: Götz Aly (Hrsg.): Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945. R. Oldenbourg Verlag, München 2009, . (Abschnitt: SA-Männer aus Lesum erschießen in der Nacht vom 9. zum 10. November 1938 drei Juden in ihren Wohnungen; Fußnoten Nr. 3, 10, 13 und 22).