Most of the focus in the lgbt community on Holocaust Memorial Day has often been towards the thousands of gay men imprisoned and killed by the Nazis. It should be remembered that lesbians were also persecuted.
One of the many lesbian victims who were lost in history re-emerged in the 1990s when she became the subject of a book called “Aimée and Jaguar” by Erica Fischer. It was the true story of a lesbian couple who were separated because one of them was a Jew.
Felice Schragenheim and Lilly Wust met in 1942. Felice was a Jewish Resistance fighter and Lilly was the wife of a Nazi soldier. They fell in love and Lilly left her husband. The two women lived together and signed a form of marriage declaration in 1943.
In 1944 Felice was betrayed to the Gestapo and she was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and later transferred to Auschwitz. Felice is thought to have died on the death march from Auschwitz to another camp in December 1944.
In the meantime Lilly was under constant observation by the Nazi authorities. Despite this she managed to hide three Jewish women in her home. They all survived the war, and in 1995 Lilly was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Israel, an honour given to non-Jews who risked their own lives to help Jews escape Germany during the war. Lilly died in 2006 and on her gravestone there is also an inscription in memory of Felice Schragenheim.
Felice was arrested because she was a Jew rather than her sexuality, and her ancestry shows a long history of her ancestors’ persecution because of their faith.
Felice’s family on both of her parents’ side fell victim to the Nazis. Her maternal grandmother had been sent to Theresienstadt, the same camp Felice was later sent to. Sadly, her grandmother died there in 1942.
Her father’s cousin, Ludwig Feuchtwanger, had a very close association with Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s. They were actual next-door neighbours. Ludwig’s son, the eminent professor Edgar Feuchtwanger (b.1925) remembers encountering Hitler outside their homes. Ludwig’s brother, Lion Feuchtwanger, became a prominent author and playwright, and wrote anti-Nazi propaganda. Naturally, once Hitler gained power the Feuchtwangers were persecuted and Lion was arrested. He managed to escape disguised as a woman and found asylum in the USA.
The Feuchtwangers, the family of Felice Schragenheim’s paternal grandmother, take their surname from the city of Feuchtwangen in Bavaria. All through the Middle Ages Jews were persecuted in many European cities. In 1555 Feuchtwangen conducted a pogrom (persecution and attacks on an ethnic, usually Jewish, minority) and expelled all remaining Jews. Felice’s ancestors fled to Fürth, a city about 60 kilometers away. There the family took the name of Feuchtwanger. In the middle of the 19th century the family moved to Munich.
Also in Fürth was the Fränkel family who had fled Vienna in 1650. Jakob Löw Feuchtwanger (d.1809) married Hanna Fränkel. The Feuchtwangers and Fränkels intermarried over several generations. The Fränkels were an influential family that extended into Poland and what is now the Czech Republic. Many male members of the family became rabbis.
A son of Jakob and Hanna was Seligmann Aharon Meir Feuchtwanger (1786-1852). He married Fanny Vogele Wassermann (1799-1875). She belonged to a wealthy family. Her father Amschel Elkan Wassermann was the court agent to the Duke of Öettingen-Wallerstein. He founded a bank in 1785 which became a leading German bank before Hitler’s rise to power.
Seligmann and Fanny’s son Jakob (1821-1890) married Auguste Hahn (1824-1896). The Hahns were, like a large number of Felice’s ancestors, from Frankfurt. Frankurt was a major centre of the European Jewish community in medieval times. Being centrally situated on trade routes that crossed the continent it attracted a large number of merchants and traders.
There were around 200 Jews in Frankfurt by 1241. There was no Jewish ghetto at that time and they travelled freely and had certain protections given to them by the emperor. However, in May 1241 unrest over the enforced Christian baptism of some Jewish children led to the citizens conducting one of the many pogroms against the Jews in Frankfurt. It is said that 180 Jews were killed and the handful that survived submitted to baptism.
The community managed to revive, aided by an influx of Jewish families from other parts of Germany escaping similar pogroms. By 1270 the community was once again flourishing. However, persecution continued to affect them, and they were taxed more heavily than the Christian community. More religious unrest led to another pogrom in 1349.
In 1462 the Jews were forcibly relocated into the Judengasse (Jew’s Alley), a street enclosed in a wall with entrance gates. It was the first ghetto in Frankfurt. As time went on and the population grew the ghetto became overcrowded, even though the ghetto limits had been expanded.
Despite the overcrowding and the persecution some Frankfurt Jewish families became some of the most influential in Germany. Many well-known modern families originated in the Judengasse – Oppenheimer, Rothschild, and Goldschmidt, among others. All of them feature in Felice Schragenheim’s ancestry.
In almost every generation of Felice’s ancestry there was anti-semitism. Some of her family bloodlines were affected more than others, but all of them show the resilience of the Jewish community that is echoed through many other families in other countries. Today, on Holocaust Memorial Day, we should remember that persecution of Jews existed before the Nazis. Let us hope that Felice Schragenheim was a member of the last generations of her family to suffer under a regime of hate.
