Joseph Weiss

Joseph Weiss was born in Vienna on April 12, 1894. His parents were the furniture manufacturer Emanuel Emil Weiss and the furniture dealer Jeanette Weiss, née Bauer. He had nine brothers and sisters, all born in Munich. Joseph attended the Oberrealschule (higher vocational school) and subsequently studied at university. He served in World War I from 1914 to 1918. After the war he worked as an independent scholar and writer. In 1923 he married Martha Hahn, née Schwab; the couple divorced in 1932. From July 1935 Joseph was registered as living in the household of his mother at Schellingstrasse 82. From 1937 onwards he ran a clerical and copy business on the fourth floor of the same building. On account of his Jewish descent, he was forced to deregister the business on November 29, 1938 with retroactive effect from November 10, 1938. On January 26, 1939 he married Elisabeth (Lisl) Springer, possibly in connection with an effort to escape anti-Semitic persecution. From June 1939 the couple lived at Rosental 19 (now Sendlinger Strasse 3).
Joseph’s renunciation of the Jewish faith on January 17, 1939 likewise did not protect him from Nazi persecution. Like his wife Lisl and his mother-in-law Dorline Springer, he was compelled to move to a so-called “Judenwohnung” (“Jews’ apartment”) at Landwehrstrasse 44. He also had to perform forced labor in a horticultural enterprise. In September 1941, a few months after his divorce from Lisl Springer in April, Joseph was forced to move to the “Judensiedling Milbertshofen” (“Milbertshofen Jews’ Colony”), a barracks camp at Knorrstrasse 148. On November 20, 1941 he was among the 1,000 Jewish men, women and children deported by the Gestapo from Munich to Kaunas in Lithuania. There the SS shot them all to death on November 25, 1941.
Joseph’s widowed mother Jeanette Weiss was murdered in the Theresienstadt Ghetto in 1942. His brother Friedrich was executed in Berlin-Plötzensee the same year; his brother Leopold had been murdered in the Dachau concentration camp in 1941. The SS murdered his sister Julie Katharina Weiss in the Auschwitz extermination camp in 1944. Joseph’s sisters Rosa, Henriette and Magdalena survived the Holocaust.(Text and translation: Judith Rosenthal; editor: C. Fritsche)