The Leibholz brothers

The family tree records “1945, KZ Auschwitz”. The Memorial Book records his deportation from Berlin to Auschwitz on 26 February 1943, and — carefully — no date of death at all, because the Federal Archives publish one only where it is certain.

He was 58. The 1945 in the tree is a family estimate that hardened into a fact. Correct the year; keep the place. Documented

A likelier reading Inferred

Sally Leibholz was himself born at Hammerstein, on 7 July 1847, and married at Szubin on 24 November 1874. So the family had people in both towns. The cleanest explanation is that Georg belonged to the Hammerstein branch Sally came from — a nephew or a cousin of Jacob's, not a brother. That keeps every documented date intact and only moves one line on the chart.

Status of Georg in this archive: Disputed — right surname, right family, wrong generation, pending a Schubin or Hammerstein register.

The question has been put to the two archives that can answer it 15 September 2026

Both towns are now in Poland, and both civil registries began in 1874 — so a birth entry from 1884 names both parents outright, which is precisely what settles whether Georg was Jacob's brother or his cousin.

Written in Polish, each with an English summary, and each told what the other has been asked. Both set out the arithmetic plainly: two children of one mother cannot be born two months apart in two provinces. If both entries survive, the parents' names decide it in a single line.

A note on method, since it nearly cost a bounce. The Polish state archives do not use the ap.gov.pl domain that most references give — the live one is archiwa.gov.pl. Checked before sending, as everything now is.

Gertrud was Oskar's wife, not Georg's Settled

The family tree attaches Gertrud Leibke to Georg, and duplicates her onto Oskar. The census settles it: Gertrud and Oskar share an address — Waghäuseler Str. 9/10, Wilmersdorf, which is exactly the district the Bundesarchiv gives for Oskar. Georg was in Mitte, with someone else.

Georg's wife was Lydia née Perl, and they died on the same day Documented

Lydia Leibholz née Perl, born 16 January 1885, lived at Michaelkirchstr. 26 — Georg's address — and died on 13 May 1942, the exact date of Georg's transport from the Łódź ghetto to Chełmno. They went together.

And two Pages of Testimony filed for Georg at Yad Vashem, by two different nieces and years apart, both give his wife's name as Lydia. Neither mentions Gertrud. Three sources, none quoting the other.

The two nieces disagree about where he died — one wrote Riga, the other Auschwitz — and the Bundesarchiv, working from the transport lists, says Łódź and then Chełmno. Two families remembered two different wrong places, which is what happens when nobody is left who saw it. It does not make them unreliable about the rest: they agreed on his wife, his city and his trade.

And Meraner Straße 2 held fourteen of them Inferred, strongly

Searched by street, that one address returns fourteen people in the persecution records, from six unrelated families — the three Leibholzes, three Salingers and a Peyser, two Schlesingers, an Ida Weil, an Anna Puff, and the Schades: Friedrich, Klara, and a boy called Heinz born in July 1933.

Six families crowded into one building, all appearing in the May 1939 census, is the signature of a Judenhaus — a house Jews were moved into after being evicted from their own homes under the tenancy law of 30 April 1939. The borough housing files would prove it; this is the shape of it.

If so, the Leibholzes were not living in their own flat by 1939. They had been concentrated there with five other families — and it is from that building that Jacob was taken on 26 February 1943.

Auguste is in the persecution records herself

She was not Jewish, and she is in the dataset anyway — Auguste Leibholz née Luwinski, Meraner Straße 2, Schöneberg — registered at her Jewish husband's address in the census whose supplementary card asked about grandparents. That is what a Mischehe looked like on paper in May 1939. Note the name: she is recorded as Frau Leibholz, which the family tree does not carry.

And she is on the Meraner Straße list. A German woman in a Mischehe did not have to follow her husband into such a building. Some did. It is the clearest thing this archive has about what she chose — and she got the younger boy out to Sommerfeld in January 1943, the month before his father was taken.

Kurt is absent. A search on Luwinski across the whole database returns two people: Auguste under her married name, and an unrelated man from Königsberg. The gap in the Berlin record is the emigration.

What is still open about Gertrud Open

Which brother she married is now answered. What is not: she died in Berlin on 27 February 1943, the day of the Fabrikaktion, and not in a camp. Yad Vashem categorises her as murdered. A death in Berlin on that particular day has an obvious and terrible range of explanations, and the record does not choose between them. The Berlin death register would.

There is no stone for him Checked

Against the register of all 738 Stolpersteine in Berlin-Schöneberg and the citywide database: none at Meraner Straße, and none for any Leibholz in the district. The Leibholz stones that do exist in Berlin belong to other Leibholz families.

Until today nobody knew the address to put one at. An application is drafted, in German, with the Gedenkbuch entry, the transport, the 1939 household and the two addressees — the Koordinierungsstelle and the Tempelhof-Schöneberg borough office.