Michael Samuel Strich was born on March 22, 1881. He was the son of the Berlin merchant Alexander Strich and his wife Eva, née Tietz. The family of his mother founded the famous department store chain of Hermann Tietz. It was planned for Michael that he too should enter the business. But he left his training in a Görlitz factory after six months and returned to schooling, reenrolling at Leibniz-Gymnasium, a secondary school in Berlin. After successfully completing his final examinations, Michael Strich studied history and history of literature in Berlin, Göttingen, Freiburg, and, from 1903, Munich. He earned his doctorate in 1907. Interested in researching Bavarian-French relations during the reign of the French king Louis XIV, study trips took him to Vienna, Paris, Rome, and Turin. He fought on the western front in the First World War and was awarded military honors for his frontline service. At the end of the war Michael Strich returned to Munich and moved into his own house at Clemensstraße 41 in 1920. His daughter Elisabeth Charlotte was born in 1923. She was baptized a Catholic, the faith of her mother. In the 1920s Michael Strich resumed his studies. In 1925 his book “Liselotte von Kurpfalz” was published, in 1933 his two volume major work “Das Kurhaus Bayern im Zeitalter Ludwigs XIV. und die europäische Mächte”. The historian enjoyed going to the opera in his spare time, playing afterwards the arias that had impressed him the most on the piano. Michael Strich’s life changed fundamentally with the rise of the Nazi dictatorship. Sales of his study “Liselotte von Kurpfalz” were impeded. On September 20, 1939 the “Arisierungsstelle” (“office of Aryanization”) dispossessed Michael Strich of his house. Although still permitted to live there, Clemensstraße 41 was turned into a “Jew house,” with 18 women and men forcibly billeted there. Along with around 1,000 Munich Jews, the Gestapo (Secret Police) deported Michael Strich on November 20, 1941 to Kaunas in Lithuania. On November 25, 1941 SS mobile killing squads shot the deportees on arrival. (text Angelika Krebs and Barbara Hutzelmann , editor C. Fritsche, translation P. Bowman)
