Siegmund Klein

Siegmund Klein (Cologne, September 9, 1874 - Auschwitz, November 19, 1943) has been a German lawyer victim of the Holocaust for his Jewish religion, deported from Amsterdam.
Biography
Son of David Klein, merchant of textiles, and Johanna Siegel he was born in Cologne in 1874.
The Klein family came from Recklinghausen where David had studied in the prestigious Gymnasium Petrinum and moved to Cologne in 1862, the Siegel family came from Mosbach. They had lived in Germany for generations.
Siegmund had a humanistic formation and knew the German and European literature very well. After his studies in law in Cologne and Strasbourg he graduated in 1899, a year after the death of his father, with a thesis on the ‘’Indirect possession in the civil code”. After the State Exam he practiced at the Cologne trial court and became afterwards legal consultant of Commerz- und Disconto-Bank, now Commerzbank. In 1905 he was admitted as a lawyer in the Appeal Court of Cologne and opened his study in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Ring n. 29. In 1911 he married Helene Mayer from Schwelm.
Siegmund became later consultant of the Barmer Bankverein and in 1923 of the Albert Ottenheimer company. In that year he moved into an apartment in Blumenthal Strasse 23, a house that survived the war destruction.
Siegmund was an active member of the Glockengasse Synagogue, the religious center of the orthodox Jewish community.
In 1938 the Jewish lawyers like him, that had been able to continue their profession because they had started it before 1914, were excluded and degraded to ‘’law consultants” only for Jewish clients. Siegmund found himself jobless and with no pension. In February 1939, after the Krystallnacht of November 1938, Siegmund and Helene left Cologne to join their son Walter who was working in Amsterdam. They rented an apartment with Walter in Serooskerkenweg 31, a German Jewish quarter.
After the German occupation of Holland he tried to emigrate to US or UK where he had relatives but with no success. The letters he wrote to his daughter Ilse who was staying in Marseille and later Nice and survived the war were conserved and published by his grandchild Giorgio Sacerdoti.
His son Walter tried to reach his daughter in Marseilles and was arrested at the Vichy border on May 29, 1942, put in prison in Dole and on August 13 delivered to the Gestapo who deported and killed him in Auschwitz on August 26, 1942.
His wife Helene died from an illness in Amerfoort Hospital on January 15, 1943, after having known of her son’s deportation from France.
He survived in Amsterdam in a pension until October 19, 1943 when he was arrested by the German police and transferred to the Westerbork transit camp from where he was able to write his last postcards to his daughter Ilse on November 2.
On November 16 Siegmund was put on the 58-th Holocaust train to Auschwitz, with other 1000 Jewish persons and killed in the gas chambers after the arrival.
Stolpersteine have been put in front of his home in Blumenthal Strasse 32 in Cologne in remembrance of him, his wife Helene and his son Walter on March 1, 2011.

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