Bernhard Freymann

Bernhard Freymann, born 1885 in Danzig, probably came to Bad Soden due to a war injury in the First World War. Even after his discharge from the military hospital, he remained severely visually impaired.
In 1917 he became a resident of Bad Soden. Since 1918 he had been registered at the same address as the deaconess Charlotte Neumann, whom he married at the end of 1926. In the same year, the Freymann couple acquired the house at Hasselstraße 14 (since 1938 Hasselstraße 20) and converted it into a boarding house in 1926/1927.
From 1927 they accommodated guests in the “Villa Charlotte”.

In October 1931 Bernhard Freymann lost his wife, but continued to run the boarding house with the help of his housekeeper Else Burow. In 1938, it is entered in the Frankfurt Address Book under boarding houses for the last time.

Not known in detail are the conditions under which Bernhard Freymann continued to run the house in Bad Soden, which was increasingly influenced by Nazis, nor the reprisals he was subjected to until February 1938 (the time of his deregistration there). First his new address in Frankfurt was the Jewish hospital in Gagernstraße, then the Jewish old people’s home in Müllerstraße. Did the visually impaired elderly gentleman hope for a more protected area in this Jewish institution? It did not remain a safe place.

On 19 or 20 October 1941, Bernhard Freymann was deported from Frankfurt to the Litzmannstadt (Lodz) ghetto, which served as a transit station for the Kulmhof, Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau), Majdanek, Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps.

Bernhard Freymann was apparently murdered there shortly after his arrival in the ghetto. His data sheet from the Yad Vashem archive does not contain a date of death. The age of death of 54 years, annotated with a question mark, is probably an estimate by the witness. In any case, Berhard Freymann had already been 56 years old in October 1941.