Hermann Marx

Hermann Marx was born on July 21, 1877 in Nördlingen; he was the eighth of ten children of Samuel Marx and his wife Margolitha, née Kohn. His father ran a hops and iron business. Around the turn of the century, the family moved to Munich. Hermann Marx worked in the banking industry in London from 1908 to 1914. In 1908 he married Marie Feuerstein in the London district of St Pancras. They divorced only six years later. During the First World War Hermann Marx fought as a soldier for the German Empire in Romania. After the end of the war he returned to Munich, where he ran an agency for ladies' and men's hats, and later for shoes. After the Nazi seizure of power Hermann Marx apparently suffered increasingly from the measures taken against Jewish businessmen. In 1938 he stated during an interrogation that his business was doing extremely badly and that he had no assets. As of October 1935, Hermann Marx lived in a sublet apartment on Pilotystraße 7 (today Franz-Josef-Strauß-Ring 4). Unlike many of his relatives, he did not emigrate – perhaps because at his age he could not get a visa or because he did not want to leave his homeland. On July 10, 1940 Hermann Marx died in the Israelitisches Kranken- und Schwesternheim, a Jewish community nursing home in Hermann-Schmid-Straße near the Theresienwiese fairgrounds. The cause of death was given in the death certificate as emaciation and pemphigus, a severe autoimmune disease that leads to death if left untreated. Hermann Marx was buried in New Jewish Cemetery in Munich. (text Stefan Dickas, editor C. Fritsche, translation T. Axelrod)