Albert Epstein

Not much is known about Albert Epstein’s early life. His father was Leopold Epstein, a master butcher. He grew up with his family in the Rhine Province, spending some time in Siegen, Westphalia, until he served at the front during the First World War – where he was shot in the lung.

From January 1926, he lived in Chemnitz and worked until the end of 1932 as a department manager at the Chemnitz department store “H. & C. Tietz’ in Chemnitz. By early 1933, Epstein was a co-owner of the firm ‘Epstein & Co.’ (Friedrichstraße 19), a large fabric department. In the same year, he married Johanna Selma Krause, the daughter of a fitter. The marriage remained childless. Albert Epstein is known as a ‘generous patron’ of the Jewish Community of Chemnitz.

In February 1936, his business was taken over by a non-Jewish partner who was a Nazi activist. He then worked as a sales representative for a wholesaler of silk and woollen fabrics. During the November pogroms of 1938, he was arrested and deported to Buchenwald concentration camp for a month. The following year, he was forced to move into the Chemnitz “Judenhaus” at Dresdner Straße 66 (city centre) – his plans to emigrate to Shanghai had failed.

From November 1940, he was forced to perform hard labour as a forestry worker, a brickmaker and at the E.F. Barthel lighting factory in Altchemnitz. In the meantime, his wife is held in pre-trial detention for “pessimistic remarks”, subsequently dismissed from her office job, and forced to perform degrading hard labour at the Josef Witt Spinning Mill – including sorting bobbins and sweeping halls.

Following the air raids in February 1945, she went into hiding. Albert, on the other hand, was deported on 14 February 1945 to the Theresienstadt ghetto, which was liberated a few months later.

On 9 June 1945, he returned to Chemnitz and in September became a founding member of the Jewish Community of Chemnitz. He then worked as provisional trustee of the formerly Jewish button factory ‘M. Alfred Mißbach’ (formerly Gustav Büchler) in Steinbach near Jöhstadt. In 1947, he purchased the button factory, which now operated under the name ‘Steinbacher Knopffabrik Albert Epstein’.

In the summer of 1949, he served temporarily as chairman of the Jewish Community of Chemnitz. In the autumn of that year, he moved to Steinbach for professional reasons, but deregistered his button factory business in 1950.

In 1953, he and his wife moved to West Berlin, and subsequently to Wiesbaden. He has lived in Sprendlingen (Dreieich, Hesse) since October 1958. Until his death in April 1964, he remained an honorary member of the Jewish Community of Karl-Marx-Stadt and was buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Frankfurt (Main). His widow died in Modautal (Hesse) in 1993.