Several Munich residents who lived at Goethestraße 43 were persecuted by the Nazi regime, stripped of their rights, and murdered because they were Jewish. The merchant Richard Einstein had lived at Goethestraße 43 since 1937. When, in July 1938, the Nazi regime revoked the permission of all Jews to work as sales representatives, Richard Einstein lost his livelihood. He died just a few months later, in November 1938, at the Jewish Hospital from colon cancer.
The young lawyer Alfred Strauß had represented clients against NSDAP members on several occasions. This likely prompted the Bavarian Minister of Justice and Nazi politician Hans Frank to arrest the lawyer at the very beginning of Nazi rule for “unscrupulous professional conduct” and send him to the Dachau concentration camp. There, Alfred Strauß was shot on May 24, 1933. Although a judicial commission ruled that this was a premeditated murder, the shooter was not convicted after the instigation of the Bavarian Political Police.
In late 1940, Alfred’s mother, Margarethe Strauß, took in the young Herbert Maier as a subtenant at Goethestraße 43. In November 1940, he married Martha Wolff. The young woman worked as a seamstress and saleswoman. Her young son, Israel Wolff, lived at the Jewish children’s home on Antonienstraße; nothing is known about his father.
One year after their wedding, in November 1941, Herbert and Martha Maier, along with her two-year-old son Israel and their landlady Margarethe Strauß, were deported by the Gestapo to Kaunas on November 20, 1941, together with approximately 1,000 other Jewish residents of Munich, where they were murdered a few days after their arrival.
.svg)
