Hertha Steinitz

Hertha Steinitz was born in Munich on February 12, 1892, the daughter of the businessman Ludwig Steinitz and his wife Emma, née Kalmus. She grew up with her brother Erich Emanuel, who was three years her junior. Her father died when she was six years old. Hertha’s widowed mother Emma Steinitz and her brother-in-law Georg Steinitz became partners in a silk and linen goods business with a factory for ladies’ hats and corsets. From 1907 onwards the Jewish family lived at Marienplatz 24. Hertha attended the Institut Siebert, the municipal Riemerschmid'sche Handelsschule (commercial school) and the Handels-Hochschule (commercial college), all in Munich. At the last-named institute she sat for her business degree examination on March 9, 1914.
After the Nazi accession to power, the Steinitz family was subjected ostracism, persecution and dispossession. In late 1940, Hertha, Emma and Erich were forced to leave their home on Marienplatz and move to a so-called “Judenwohnung” (“Jews’ apartment”) at Goethestrasse 74. Emma Steinitz died of a stroke there on April 2, 1941. On November 20, 1941, the Gestapo deported Hertha Steinitz and her brother Erich to Kaunas in Lithuania along with some 1,000 other Jewish men, women and children of Munich. Five days later the entire group of deportees were shot to death there by SS troops. (Text Barbara Hutzelmann, editor C. Fritsche, translation J. Rosenthal)