Paul Reichenbach

Paul made his working life in the family clothing business at Hoher Weg 27 and Martiniplan 10. Away from the shop, he joined the Halberstadt section of the German and Austrian Alpine Club (Deutscher und Österreichischer Alpenverein) in its founding year, 1909, and remained on its rolls for more than two decades. His 1931 and 1932 routes crossed the Upper Engadine and the Zugspitze region.

In 1917 the Prussian government awarded him the Merit Cross for War Aid and addressed him at Hoher Weg 27, printed as “Hoheweg” in the notice. The award belongs to the history of a German Jew whose public service and German citizenship were later rendered meaningless by the state.

When Paul turned fifty on 20 October 1926, the Centralverein’s national newspaper publicly honored the long-serving former chairman of its Halberstadt branch. It praised his tireless years in the struggle against antisemitism and his distinction in many honorary offices. The notice gives documentary context to a large family photograph remembered as his fiftieth-birthday celebration.

Contemporary address books add another part of Paul’s public life. In 1914, the directory names Paul and Ernst Reichenbach as proprietors of Paul’s women’s-fashion business. In 1928, it places Paul on the boards of the Israelitischer Kinderhort, a Jewish child-care and welfare organization, and Neweh Menuchoh, the association connected with Halberstadt’s Jewish old-age home; the punctuation names someone else, not Paul, as the Kinderhort treasurer. A Keren Kajemeth New Year list published that September records Paul and Ernst each giving 10 Goldmarks to the Jewish National Fund. These entries show Paul taking responsibility for Jewish communal welfare and supporting this particular fundraising campaign; they do not tell us everything about his religious or political life.

He helped turn Hoher Weg 27 and Martiniplan 10 into a glass-roofed department store. In his final months he was also the family’s first known genealogical researcher. On 17 April 1935 he wrote to the professional genealogist Rudolf Jakob Simonis, tracing the family to Gröbzig, recording traditions that a great-grandfather went to war with the Prussians and was said to have fallen at the Berezina, and that a female ancestor sheltered the fugitive Lieutenant Katte. He planned to inspect the Gröbzig cemetery himself. Simonis’s archive preserves Paul’s signed letter immediately before an unsigned Halberstadt inquiry dated 4 February 1936; because Paul had died, that sequence strongly indicates that Simonis continued the investigation, although the unsigned page cannot establish authorship absolutely.

Paul died at Sedanstraße 52 at 7:30 p.m. on 20 November 1935. His family remembers a heart attack. Six days earlier, the first Nuremberg implementing regulation had defined who the regime would classify as a Jew. The civil register, the cemetery register and the stone all record that evening; they do not assign the laws as a medical cause.

Two days later, Margarete, Ernst, Ruth and Albert Rothschild, and Adolf placed a family death notice in the Central-Verein-Zeitung. It is a paid Todesanzeige, separate from the family-held Trauer-Album, and it names no offices.

Paul’s yahrzeit date is 25 Marḥeshvan. The civil register, cemetery register and gravestone together allow the two calendars to be read as one event. The epitaph’s words—“Suddenly he departed from this world”—preserve how the shock was remembered by his wife, children, family and community.