Paula Jordan, geb. Frank

Paula Jordan was born in Steinach an der Saale near Bad Kissingen on May 17, 1889. Her father, the cattle wholesaler Lazarus Frank, was the head of the Jewish community and a member of the local council. Paula Frank attended the Institut der Englischen Fräulein, a school in Bad Kissingen. Following her marriage to the art dealer Siegfried Jordan on December 16, 1921 she moved with him to Munich. Together the couple ran the Jordan & Co. art gallery, which was initially located at Blumenstraße 21 and later at Prinzregentenstraße 2. Their son Peter was born in 1923. Two years later the young family moved to Mauerkircherstraße 13. The situation of the Jordan family deteriorated after the Nazi seizure of power. Like all Jews, Paula and Siegfried Jordan were not permitted to be members of the Reichskammer der bildenden Künste (Reich Chamber of Fine Arts), which meant that they got no permit to deal in so-called “German cultural heritage”. In 1938 they had to relinquish their trade. In December 1939, the gallery was transferred to a long-serving employee and to the non-Jewish brother-in-law of Paula Jordan, the future German Federal Justice Minister Dr. Thomas Dehler. The Jordan family had for a long time been unable to decide to leave Germany because they felt a deep association with Munich. In May 1939, Paula and Siegfried Jordan managed to make it possible for their son Peter, then 15, to emigrate to Great Britain, which saved his life. They could not guess that they would never see him again. In the Spring of 1940, Paula and Siegfried Jordan were forced to leave their apartment in Mauerkircherstraße. They subsequently lived in several different places, including in a boarding house at Leopoldstraße 16. Paula and Siegfried Jordan received the first deportation order in Munich along with some 1,000 other Jewish women, men and children. On November 20, 1941 the Gestapo (Secret Police) sent them to the “Judensiedlung” (“Jewish Quarter”) Milbertshofen at Knorrstraße 148 and deported them to Kaunus in Lithuania. There, SS mobile killing squads shot them on November 25, 1941 and had them buried in mass graves.(text Barbara Hutzelmann, editor C. Fritsche, translation C. Hales)