TF–22
In August 1933, Die Stimme, a Jewish newspaper from Vienna, reported with a slightly amused undertone about the „chutzpah“ of Siegbert Mann from Lorsch, who had posed as a Nazi party member. In addition to being sentenced to the prison term described, Mann had previously been deported to the Osthofen concentration camp near Worms. Five years later, in 1938, Austrian Jews were the first to experience the full force of the Nazi extermination program. The elimination of Jewish economic life after the Nazi seizure of power directly affected the rural Jews as businessmen. Livestock dealers held out the longest, until 1937, when they were forbidden access to slaughterhouses in Hesse. Sales in the trade fell to almost zero. In order to make a living, mortgages were taken out on the houses. Foreclosures followed. After the pogrom in 1938, the Nazi state took what was left with a „Jewish property levy“. 30,000 Jews were forced into concentration camps to make a „voluntary“ declaration to immigrate. If one was then actually lucky enough to obtain a foreign visa, everything had to be given up. The highly mortgaged houses mostly fell to the banks. Those who had not managed to leave Germany by the beginning of the war in 1939 were threatened with deportation „to the East“ from 1942. Siegbert Mann, who was married to a Catholic, was arrested at his workplace in the Lorsch sawmill on March 9, 1943 and taken to Auschwitz.