Familie Hartbrodt

Since 2017, three books that belonged to the Hartbrodt family could be restituted. At the request of the heirs, the volumes were handed over to the Stiftung Neue Synagoge – Centrum Judaicum in Berlin.

The marks found in the books could be clearly attributed to the Hartbrodt family. However, in the case of the book dedicated to a Frau Hartbrodt, it remains unclear which specific family member was its last owner. The two other books belonged to Erich Lutz Hartbrodt.

Erich Lutz Hartbrodt was born in Berlin on 21 July 1924. His father was Alfred Hartbrodt, a merchant born in Briesen on 25 July 1883; his mother was Marga Hartbrodt (née Bendit), born in Berlin on 25 December. The couple had married in Berlin on 25 October 1923. Erich had a younger sister, Ilse Hanna Hartbrodt, who was born in Berlin on 17 December 1926.

The Hartbrodt family was persecuted as Jewish in Nazi Germany. Alfred Hartbrodt died in Berlin on 5 September 1935. In 1939, Erich Hartbrodt managed to escape to England via a Kindertransport, with the help of the Inter-Aid Committee. There he initially settled in Leeds, where he attended a technical school run by ORT (Organisation – Rehabilitation – Training, now World ORT (Organisation – Reconstruction – Training)). The Berlin-Leeds ORT School had originally been founded in Berlin in 1937 to provide technical training for Jewish boys who would otherwise have been excluded from school due to anti-Semitic laws in Germany.

Marga Hartbrodt, née Bendit, was a forced labourer at the Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken A. G. (DWM) in Berlin-Borsigwalde. On 14 November 1941, she and her daughter Ilse were deported from Berlin to the Minsk Ghetto and murdered. The exact dates of their deaths are unknown.

Erich Lutz Hartbrodt survived the Shoah in exile in England. He changed his first name to Eric and lived in England until his death on 8 November 1962.

Mrs. Hartbrodt's book was acquired by the Berlin City Library in 1943 as part of the purchase of ~40,000 books looted from Berlin’s Jewish residents. Erich Lutz Hartbrodt’s books were recorded as “gifts” in 1945. The supplier listed in the acquisition journal, “Kulturamt”, is presumably connected to the Berlin Magistrate. However, there is evidence that this supplier designation was also used after the end of the war in 1945 for the abovementioned books that had been taken from the last homes of Berlin’s Jewish residents in 1943.