Ella Oestreicher, geb. Dittmann

Ella Dittmann was born on March 16, 1890 in Bayreuth to the Jewish merchant and hops dealer Nathan Dittmann and his wife Mina, née Kirschbaum. Very little is known about Ella’s childhood and youth. When she was six years old, her father died. In 1901 her mother remarried; one year later Ella’s half-brother Ludwig Landauer was born. Ella Dittmann married the merchant Friedrich Oestreicher on January 22, 1914 in Munich. Just a few weeks later, the newlyweds moved into a third-floor apartment at Widenmayerstraße 36. The Nazi seizure of power brought fundamental changes to the lives of Ella and Friedrich Oestreicher. Friedrich Oestreicher was picked up and taken to Dachau concentration camp in the course of the “Kristallnacht” pogroms on November 9, 1938; his business was “aryanized.” From 1939 the couple tried in vain to emigrate to the USA. In February 1941 Ella and Friedrich Oestreicher had to leave the apartment where they had lived for 27 years and move in to the “Pension International” in Kaulbachstraße 35. Ella Oestreicher was deported from the Milbertshofen freight station to Kaunas in Lithuania on November 20, 1941, together with her husband, her half-brother Ludwig Landauer and about 1,000 other Jewish men, women and children. It was the first mass deportation of Jews from Munich. The original destination was to be Riga, but because the ghetto there was overcrowded, the train was diverted. On November 25, 1941 SS men, headed by SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger, shot Ella Oestreicher and the other deportees from Munich in Fort IX in Kaunas. Ella Oestreicher’s mother, Mina Landauer, did not survive the Holocaust either. She was murdered on September 19, 1942 in Treblinka extermination camp .(text Thomas Nowotny, editor C. Fritsche, translation T. Axelrod)