The Schwarz and Mahler families

The patriarch of both families, Siegfried Schwarz, was born in St. Pölten in 1867, was married twice, and died there in 1927. Together with Camilla, née Frank, who died in 1907 aged only 27, he had three children, Hermann, Johanna, and Alice, while his son Egon was born from his second marriage with Bertha, née Grünfeld.

Bertha Schwarz, née Grünfeld

“I therefore believe that in the case at hand all conditions have been met to urgent­ ly deal with this issue in an upright manner, as my Aryan clients will otherwise suffer severe damages. I therefore request an immediate resolution and sign off with Heil Hitler!” Lawyer Dr. Hans Geiger to the Property Transaction Office, department for real estate, regarding the sale of the house at Rennbahnstraße 16, St. Pölten, December 27, 1938

Bertha was born in Pilsen (Bohemia) on November 27, 1880, as one of the eight children of the merchant Ludwig Grünfeld and his wife Gabriele, née Fleisch. It is not known when she married Siegfried Schwarz, who had been a widower since June 1907, and moved to St. Pölten, yet their son Egon Jehuda was born there on May 23, 1913. On August 17 of that year, the magnificent synagogue was inaugurated. The Schwarz couple donated 240 Crowns for the window in the form of a Star of David and decorated with colorful mosaics above the Torah Shrine, upon which their names were inscribed. Siegfried Schwarz became a founding member of the Temple Construction Association in 1907 and supported the building with a donation of 1,000 Crowns as well as supporting the funding for a window. He served as head of the Jewish community in 1908/1909 and both he and his children were active in various spheres of the St. Pölten Jewish community organization. He ran the company “Alexander Schwarz & Söhne” founded by his father at Rennbahnstraße 16, which processed and traded in furs and hides. Siegfried died aged only fifty on May 10, 1927, two weeks before the fourteenth birthday of his youngest son, Egon. Bertha took over the business together with her stepchildren Johanna (born 1900) and Hermann (born 1905) as equal partners. At the end of 1935, all three of them submitted a request to the St. Pölten Jewish community organization – in which Bertha was described as an “elderly, sickly woman no longer particularly capable of working” – to have their religious community tax reduced due to the bad economic situation. The tone of the letter is very harsh: “We cannot imag­ ine that the appraisement committee is made up of unworldly privateers who have no idea about the economic life and the terrible struggles of the merchant class in the year 1935.”

Immediately following the “Anschluss,” the company was robbed and from June 1938 onward, the acting director Hugo Mrazek – who had been “deputy local party head” of the Nazi Party since 1934, when it was still banned – enforced its liquidation and the confiscation of its assets. As Mrazek reported in his “final report on the liquidation” dated July 27, 1938, the “business result for the first two quarters was very good, totaling no less than 12,585.47 Reichsmark.” The company had thus obviously recovered and by then employed two workers outside of the family. Mrazek estimated that the remaining assets, namely the company and residential building including furnishings and a motorbike, were worth 41,705.14 Reichsmark and 835.40 Reichsmark, respectively, although he noted: “Regarding the motorbike, I wish to note that this has already been confiscated by the NSKK and has to date not been returned.” This “wild Aryanization,” meaning an act of theft by the “Nationalsozialistische Kraftfahrkorps” (National Socialist Motor Corps), presumably took place immediately following the “Anschluss.” Naturally, Hugo Mrazek paid himself a fee from the company’s assets for his liquidation activities, which he registered as 53.33 Reichsmark per week.

On October 29, 1938, Hermann and Egon Schwarz together with Johanna, married name Mahler, sold their company and residential building at Rennbahnstraße 16 to Oskar and Veronika Zottleder, though the sales contract was only approved by the Property Transaction Office on March 11, 1939. Even then, the siblings were not granted the proceeds, as the sales price was transferred to a so-called secure account at the St. Pölten branch of the Creditanstalt-Bankverein – Hugo Mrazek called this a “frozen account.” 200 Reichsmark per month were paid from this account each to Bertha from October 1939 to October 1940, to Hermann until February 1940, and to Johanna until June 1940. This meant that they had no money available to pay for the cost of removals, travel, or visas.

As happened in so many other cases, this malicious withholding of the sales proceeds and the bureaucratic hurdles prevented them from fleeing on time. In her Property Registration dated July 15, 1938, Bertha Schwarz listed alongside her shares in the business an additional 1,000 Reichsmark worth of jewelry and valuables. It is doubtful whether she was allowed to keep these – more probably, as is also documented in numerous other cases, she was forced to hand these over to the Dorotheum. On August 31, 1939, Bertha deregistered to Wollzeile 15 in Vienna’s first district, before being forced to relocate to Große Stadtgutgasse 28/28 in the second district in October. On June 5, 1942, she was deported from there to Izbica. The date she was murdered is not known.