Translation by Joana Brooks and Lesley Loy

The merchant and wine merchant Heinrich Dottenheimer, born on November 15th, 1855 in Markt Berolzheim, was the son of master tailor Joel Dottenheimer and his wife Dina, née Fellheimer.

As a young adult, he moved to Gunzenhausen and opened a wholesale wine and spirits store in 1883. In the same year he married Ida Asyl, born March 19, 1861 in Cronheim as the daughter of Bernhard Asyl and Amalia, née Heymann. However, he only received citizenship on December 29, 1897.

House No. 10 on Nürnberger Straße is mentioned as the first address for their business.

In 1900 he had his own residential and commercial building built on the corner of Burgstallstrasse and Bühringerstrasse. Many older Gunzenhausen citizens still remember the 'immensely large wine shop' of the Dottenheimer family at Burgstallstraße 1.

                                  Advert and shop sign

In addition, Heinrich Dottenheimer had a building built in 1906 with a 5m deep cellar as a wine store. Today it has the number 1a, the deep basement is still there.

Heinrich and his wife Ida had five children, but only two lived to adulthood.

Hermann *26.01.1885 in Gunzenhausen, +19.02.1885

Frieda *10.07.1886 in Gunzenhausen

Sigmund *18.10.1887 in Gunzenhausen

Louis *28.01.1889 in Gunzenhausen +19.08.1889

Max *06.08.1893 +16.10.1893

Mother Ida died 13.01.1907.

Frieda and Sigmund worked together in the business, and in 1912, father Heinrich transferred the house and business to his son Sigmund. Later, Frieda's husband, Max Strauß, joined the business as a partner.

Frieda and Max Strauss built their own house at Bismarckstraße 7 in 1927.

Sigmund and his wive Frieda Dottenheimer © Stadtarchiv Gunzenhausen

In 1913, Sigmund Dottenheimer married a woman from the Franconian wine region. It is Frieda Reinhardt from Gerolzhofen, born on July 10, 1889 as the daughter of Meier Reinhardt and his wife Emilie, née Schloß. When she gets married, her parents give her a precious Torah shield to take with her into the marriage. It is made available to the synagogue in Gunzenhausen, where it serves to adorn the Torah.

They had four children

Fredi und Kurt Dottenheimer © Stadtarchiv Gunzenhausen

Irene und Werner Dottenheimer © Stadtarchiv Gunzenhausen

The family becomes wealthy and is one of the first in the city to own a car. And its own telephone, with the number 4.

In the picture you can see Frieda Dottenheimer with her sons and chauffeur.  © Faye Dottheim Brooks, New York

The eldest son Fredi moved to Augsburg after attending Realschule in 1929. As at this time there were no signs of anti-Semitism, we can only suppose that he moved for business reasons. He began an apprenticeship as a merchant there.

The photo shows him with his secondary school class.

4th grade class in Gunzenhausen with Jewish teacher Arnold Kurzmann in the 1927/28 school year.

First row sitting on the floor, third from left: Fredi Dottenheimer

© Frieda Schmidt, Gunzenhausen, STAGUN with publication rights.

Apparently, he was a good soccer player, as there are many pictures of his playing days in the Regionalliga in Augsburg. His soccer talent may also have been the reason he moved to the larger city, as he would have had little opportunity to play in a higher league in Gunzenhausen.

Freddy is standing on the far right in the photo © Faye Dottheim Brooks, New York

But at home, in addition to the global economic crisis, discrimination against Jewish businesspeople was becoming increasingly noticeable. As early as 1930, the family was forced to rent out the ground floor of their commercial building. Dentist Karl Liebl opened his practice there. From September 1, 1937, it was continued by Reinhard Carben from Markt Berolzheim.

During these years, the Dottenheimer family suffered greatly from the business boycott, so much so that Sigmund Dottenheimer and Max Strauß deregistered the business as early as 1933.
Citing economic difficulties, Sigmund Dottenheimer submitted two requests to the Gunzenhausen City Council in 1934, requesting permission to serve wine on Jewish holidays and to establish a coffee shop in his company's former offices. The council rejected the requests on October 17, 1934, arguing that there was no public need for the business.

Wilhelm Lux, a Gunzenhausen journalist and contemporary witness reported at length on this in magazine 44/1988 of "Alt Gunzenhausen" where he recognized in this "the complete brutality of the new rulers towards the Jewish population…" "One can only argue that pure malice was behind these harsh words and the intention to humiliate the Jewish population even further. According to Wilhelm Lux, the Jewish Dottenheimer family "belonged to the most respected within the Jewish community and enjoyed a considerable reputation amongst the non-Jewish population".

Heinrich Dottenheimer registered his address in Munich on 28.11.1938.
Sigmund Dottenheimer and his son Kurt were deported to the Dachau concentration camp on 1.12.1938, but were later released.

According to Sigmund Dottenheimer's granddaughter, Faye Dottheim Brooks, who now lives in New York, her grandmother was forced to sell the house at this time to the "Großdeutsche Reich" for 910 RM. They in turn disposed of it in 1944 to the NSDAP and it later became property of the town. On his release from the Dachau concentration camp Sigmund Dottenheimer and his family left Gunzenhausen and moved to Frankfurt/Main.  All their children accompanied them, except Joel Fredi.

But a few weeks later, Kurt and Werner are registered in Munich. Irene apparently has to go to Berlin to work at Siemens.

However shortly afterwards they must have lost track of each other, as Mrs Dottheim Brooks writes that her grandparents thought that their daughter Irene wanted to leave Germany.  They then sent a trunk of household articles to Rotterdam but this was destroyed in a bombing raid.  The tragic part of this story is that the 18 year old girl had already been in a concentration camp for some time, where is unknown, but she was declared dead in 1945.

Only Joel Fredi, the eldest son, was able to leave Germany in time.

His daughter wrote to us:
"With regards to his travels, his passport is stamped Augsburg on May 21, 1937, Hamburg on May 25, 1937 and Southampton, England on May 28, 1937. He arrived in the United States sometime in 1937 and settled in St. Louis, Missouri."

Sigmund Dottenheimer had apparently managed to obtain an entry permit to the USA for his eldest son. The family of his sister Frieda Strauß, who had already emigrated in 1934, most likely offered to act as guarantors. Unfortunately, he was unable to find guarantors for the rest of the family, who would have had to declare in a so-called 'affidavit' that they would cover the costs of the immigrants. The American government was not supposed to incur any costs as a result of them.

In a desperate fight, Sigmund tried to save his family. Without success.

• Heinrich Dottenheimer perished in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, aged 88.
• Sigmund Dottenheimer and his wife Frieda disappeared in the Auschwitz camp
• Werner Hermann Dottenheimer died aged 19 in the Majdanek camp
• Kurt and Irene Dottenheimer were declared dead as of 1945 as no one knew where they perished

Fredi is the only survivor of the whole Dottenheimer family.

The large business premises in the Burgstallstrasse were used by the women's division of the NS during the war. The dentist's practice was closed from 1940 to 1945 as R. Carben was called up for army service.

His son, Rainer Carben, reported :
On 01.09 1937 my father sub rented the practice and living areas on the ground floor of the Dottenheimer's house. He married my mother Frieda Faulstich in May 1940 and I was born in February 1941. My father was called up for army service in 1940. After the eviction of the Dottenheimer family, an NSDAP organization moved into all the rooms on the ground floor. My mother, her sister "Bobby" and I carried on living in the flat on the ground floor of Burgstallstrasse 1. In 1945 the house, including all the furniture, was occupied for a short time by the US army and during this period we lived with our grandmother in the Brunnengasse. Afterwards we lived on the ground floor of Burgstallstrasse 1 until 1956. My father came back from captivity in autumn 1945 and opened his practice again. As of 1945 the premises were first owned by a Jewish organization and then became the property of the Free State of Bavaria. In 1956 my father bought the outbuildings and wine cellar from the State and converted them into the house at Burgstallstrasse 1a.
According to my father, one night a member of the Dottenheimer family asked my father for shelter from the Nazis and he gave it to him, on the ground floor. So members of the Dottenheimer family must still have been living on the upper floor of the house after 1937. Probably this incident took place on "Reichskristallnacht" in 1938. After the war the town rented the house out to nine tenants, mainly refugees, who had to live in a very small space.

It was only in 1956, ten years after the end of the war, that it became known in Gunzenhausen that Fred Dottenheimer had survived. He wrote to Miss Frieda Wiedmann, the family's seamstress before the war. He had learned from Lehmanns (Burgstallstrasse 7) that Frieda Wiedmann had been given a suitcase by his parents to keep for them. And this lady really did send a case with cutlery and table linen to Fred in St Louis in 1956. She had kept it for eighteen years, since the family's departure in 1938.

In 1956 Reinhard Carben bought the former wine store and converted it into a residential house and practice - today it is Burgstallstrasse 1a. Karl Marschall's family bought the large corner house in that same year and installed a hairdressing salon there. Karl Marschall had opened a hairdresser's in the Spitalstrasse already in 1925 and then transferred it to the Bahnhofstrasse in 1930. In 1983, following Karl Marschall's death, his son Werner Marschall and wife Margot took over the house at Burgstallstrasse 1. It remains a significant spot in the town up until today.

Joel Fredi Dottenheimer's daughter, Faye Dottheim-Brooks, visited Gunzenhausen with her family in March 2001.

She wrote to us about her reasons:
"In August my brother Stephan received a letter from the Director of the Franken Jewish Museum that they have in their collection an item of property stolen from my grandfather during Kristallnacht and they are searching for direct descendants of Sigmund Dottenheimer. The item is a torah breastplate."

Fred had changed his name to Dottheim, so it hadn't been easy to find the family in the USA. His descendants live in New York today and after their trip to Germany they told us that they had left the object on long-term loan with the Franconian Jewish Museum in Fürth. It remained there until 20 February 2003.  In future it will be exhibited at least for some time in the Gunzenhausen town museum.  The Dottheim-Brooks family was here for the presentation of the torah breastplate in the Gunzenhausen town museum on 14 March 2004.

We were able to see the 300 year old plate when we visited the museum. Sigmund Dottenheimer had made it available to the Gunzenhausen Synagogue over quite a long time as ornamentation for the torah.   Mr Purin explained to us the whole adventure of this precious ritual object, the value of which is estimated by experts to be equal to the cost of a family house.  Some ten years earlier a man had appeared at the Fürth town archives and handed over, amongst other things, two torah plates.  He had received them from his father-in-law, who had been given them.

Only with the opening of the Jewish Museum was the shield, which features two unicorns, restored, and information about the owner was discovered on small paper rolls.

Thanks to Mr. Purin, the descendants were found in the USA, who then contacted the city of their ancestors.

Even the New York Times published a detailed article about the odyssey of this Torah shield from Gunzenhausen in August 2001.

The only condition the Dottheim-Brooks family had attached to the loan moved us deeply: It is to be brought to New York for important family celebrations.

On February 22, 2003, their youngest daughter, Kara, celebrated her Bat Mitzvah in New York. As a daughter of the law, she was called to the Torah – comparable to confirmation in the Catholic Church and confirmation in the Protestant Church.
For this celebration, the Torah shield was to be brought to the synagogue in New York. And so, Dr. Bernhard Purin, Mayor Trautner of Gunzenhausen, Rector Franz Müller, City Archivist Werner Mühlhäußer, and consultant Ingeborg Hermann traveled to the Bat Mitzvah in the USA with the precious shield in their luggage. For the first time since the Holocaust, it served its original purpose in a synagogue: to adorn the Torah.

A Hebrew text is read out during the Bat Mizvah. Each week of the year has its specific segment, as the whole torah should be read out within the year. So Kara knew which chapter she would be reading : it was the story of the golden calf. She had to practice for a whole year.

Kara's sister Joana spent July 2002 and 2003 here in Gunzenhausen and came to lessons in our class. We really liked her. She spent her free afternoons with the other pupils.  The aim of the trip was to improve her German.  We visited the Jewish cemetery in Bechhofen with her and found it a great shame that she had to leave after four weeks. But she returned in the following years, her sister Kara too. Now she speaks our language perfectly and has married a German man, Markus Klostermeyer from Bavaria.

Memorial plaque in the cemetery

In 2008 the Dottheim family mounted a memorial plaque in the Jewish cemetery of Gunzenhausen to commemorate the dead of their ancestors.

More information about the Dottheim family you can find there https://jl-gunzenhausen.de/de/geschichtswettbewerb.html and there https://jl-gunzenhausen.de/de/einladung-zur-bat-mitzvah.html