The beginning of the end of German Jewry

1933

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Thursday
30 March 1933

Acknowledgement of Receipt for a Borrowed Car

On 30 March 1933, the SS—the paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party—borrowed a passenger car from the Regensburg-based company Edmund Jacobi Nachfolger. According to the acknowledgement of receipt issued by the SS squad leader, the vehicle was to be used for patrol duty "to protect the local Jewry." The real purpose of the loan is hidden behind the seemingly innocent phrasing.

On 1 April, the NSDAP declared a nationwide boycott of Jewish offices, law firms, and medical practices. These measures were enacted a few days earlier in Regensburg, and it is likely that the SS wanted to use the car in this period.

Edmund Jacobi Nachfolger, a liqueur company established in 1886, was owned by the Jewish Binswanger family and run by Alfred Binswanger (1860–1933). On the same day he was forced to lend his car to the SS, Alfred Binswanger was arrested together with more than 120 other Jewish businessmen.

Franziska Bogdanov

Categorie(s): boycott | businessmen | Regensburg
Acknowledgement of receipt for a car borrowed from the company Edmund Jacobi Nachfolger, Regensburg, 30 March 1933
Gift of Danny L. Goldberg

The Binswanger family

The Binswangers, a Jewish manufacturing family, originally came from the Swabian town of Osterberg, and later settled in Augsburg. In 1838, while still in Osterberg, Jacob Binswanger established the family‘s first business, called Jacob Binswanger & Cie. Likörfabrik. Knowledge of liqueur production was passed down from generation to generation in the family. In the following decades, the parent company was joined by branches in Munich and Regensburg—including the liqueur factory run under the name of Edmund Jacobi Nachfolger. All of these enterprises were run by members of the family.

The company‘s last owners were Albert Binswanger and his cousin Ernst Mayer. The two men immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s. The Binswangers‘ family-run company celebrated its one-hundredth anniversary in 1938. Shortly afterward, the forced sale of the company brought its long history to an end.

The papers of the Binswanger family were donated to the Jewish Museum Berlin in 2010 by one of the family‘s descendants, Danny L. Goldberg.

Augsburg headquarters of the liqueur producer Jacob Binswanger & Cie., 1920–1938
Gift of Danny L. Goldberg 
CREDITS