In 1843, according to the firm’s own later advertisement, a Reichenbach clothing house opened in Halberstadt. By the early twentieth century, J. Reichenbach stood over shop windows in two Harz towns and appeared in ink on the hangers inside.
Jacob Reichenbach began the family line now visible behind the shop. His son Adolf stayed in Halberstadt and married Goldine Marcuse of Schwerin. Another son, Salomon Gustav, moved to Wernigerode and married Jeanette Rosenbaum. Their 1883 civil marriage record names Gustav as Jacob and Helene’s son, joining the two shops as one family history.
Adolf’s son Paul ran the Halberstadt business. He was also a father, an Alpine Club member, the recipient of a Prussian wartime decoration and, in his last months, the family’s first known genealogist. In Wernigerode, Gustav and Jeanette’s only son Fritz carried the shop forward at Breite Straße 7.
Paul married Margarete Liebenthal in 1908. Their daughter Ruth was born in 1909 and their son Adolf “Dolf” in 1914. Photographs show them dressed for the street, laughing at a party, resting outdoors and sitting together in a rowboat.
After 1933, Nazi law and violence stripped Jewish families of work, property and safety. Paul’s Prussian decoration counted for nothing. On 26 August 1938, Fritz signed away Breite Straße 7. A clause in the deed says official approval was required because the seller was a Jew. He was arrested during the November pogrom and murdered at Buchenwald on 22 November.
A non-Jewish friend warned Dolf by telephone, according to the account remembered by his daughter Susan Reichenbach Heyman. Dolf left for Switzerland that afternoon. From the Carlton Hotel in St. Moritz, he wrote to Margarete on 26 November 1938: “It’s also nice outside without money, one is a person again, always keep that in mind.” The English is Rabbi Dr. Esther Jilovsky’s translation.
Ruth and Albert Rothschild were already in the United States before Dolf and Margarete’s American record trail was complete. Susan remembers that Albert’s friend Max wrote in support of Dolf’s move. That letter has not been found, Max’s full identity remains unknown, and the passenger and naturalization records do not settle the family’s final sequence of departure.
On 12 April 1942 Halberstadt ordered 102 Jews to Domplatz. Among them were Kurt Reichenbach, Paula Wollenberg née Reichenbach and Paula’s son Hans. On 16 April, at six in the morning, Adam Czerniaków recorded a train of newcomers from Germany arriving in Warsaw. No surviving record now places Kurt, Paula or Hans after that morning.
Jeanette, who had kept the Wernigerode shop at Breite Straße 7, was deported to Theresienstadt at eighty-two and died there six weeks later.
Dolf became a clothing designer in America, married Susan Ulmer and raised two children. Paul J. Reichenbach spent forty-four years building Reform Jewish youth, camp and Israel programs. Daniel Dolph Reichenbach entered the rabbinate. Other descendants sustained congregations, education and family memory.