In 1843, according to the firm’s own later advertisement, a Reichenbach clothing house began in Halberstadt. By the early twentieth century its name belonged to a substantial commercial building, to store objects marked in ink and wood, and to a family whose private and public lives were rooted in the Harz region.
The documented story of the business begins with Jacob Reichenbach and continues through two of his sons. Adolf remained in Halberstadt and married Goldine Marcuse of Schwerin. Salomon Gustav moved to Wernigerode and married Jeanette Rosenbaum. Their 1883 civil marriage record names Gustav as Jacob and Helene’s son: the Wernigerode Reichenbachs were the same family, not a suggestive name match.
Adolf’s son Paul became the family member most fully visible in the Halberstadt record: proprietor, father, Alpine Club member, recipient of a Prussian wartime decoration, and, in his last months, researcher of the family’s own past. Gustav and Jeanette’s only son Fritz carried the Wernigerode business 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 Germany stripped Jewish citizens of civic and economic life by law and violence. Paul’s Prussian wartime decoration counted for nothing. In Wernigerode, Fritz signed away Breite Straße 7 under a deed that recorded him as a Jew and, for that reason, required official approval. Eleven weeks later, on 10 November 1938, he was arrested during the November pogrom. He was killed at Buchenwald on 22 November.
Dolf escaped to Switzerland. From the Carlton Hotel in St. Moritz, he wrote to Margarete on 26 November 1938, asking her not to fear the loss of money and standing: “one is a person again,” he told her. The sentence is powerful because it is private—one son trying to persuade his mother to live. The English translation is by Rabbi Dr. Esther Jilovsky.
Ruth and Albert Rothschild were already in the United States before Dolf and Margarete’s American record trail was complete. Susan Reichenbach Heyman remembers that Albert’s friend Max wrote a letter supporting Dolf’s move; the passenger and naturalization records now keep the exact final-emigration sequence open.
On 12 April 1942, Kurt Reichenbach, Paula Wollenberg née Reichenbach and her son Hans were forced from Halberstadt and deported east. They were taken through the Magdeburg collection camp on 13 April and placed on the 14 April transport recorded in Warsaw on 16 April. Jeanette Reichenbach of Wernigerode, eighty-two years old, was deported to Theresienstadt and died six weeks later.
Dolf became a clothing designer in America, married Susan Ulmer and raised two children. In the generations that followed, rebuilding Jewish life took more than one form. 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. The objects, return visits and research that produced this archive belong to that continuing history.