Werner Kraus (1916)

Born 1916 in Spremberg

Ancestors

Biography

Werner was born in 1916 in Spremberg, a town north-east of Dresden and not far from the (present) Polish border. His father, Siegfried Kraus, was a textile manufacturer and "K.u.K.-Reserveleutnant" in 1870 born into a Jewish family in Vienna. He came to Germany when he was seventeen years old, was baptized and married Ilse Karge, who was descended from a Protestant family of farmers settled in Silesia. He was the major partner in the textile factory of Michelsohn & Ascher established in Spremberg.^[1]

After his father died in 1937 Werner became solely responsible for the company. His letters to his brother Fritz Rudolf provide an impressive picture of the difficult life of a half-Jew in Nazi Germany (although the even more bitter and humiliating aspects of it, suppressed by (self)censoring, were only revealed after the war) and, after 1945, the anxieties of a beginner entrepreneur in the Soviet Zone, later the GDR. Low points were the expropriation of the textile factory, ‘arianized’ by the Nazis in 1938, his imprisonment in a forced labour camp in Thuringia in 1945, and the threat of execution shortly before the fall of Spremberg in April of the same year.

In November 1952 he married Charlotte (Lotte) Lówenstein who he had first met in Schlottwitz, where she lived nearby on a farm with her mother.

Sources

1. ↑ "Spremberger Tuchfabrik Michelsohn & Ascher AG" ( until 1933: Michelsohn u. Ascher AG)

See also:

• Dreizehn Jahre Istanbul (1937-1949) (2 vols). Der deutsche Assyriologe Fritz Rudolf Kraus und sein Briefwechsel im türkischen Exil. Editor: Jan Schmidt. Publication Date: 23 January 2014, ISBN: 978-90-04-26307-9