The beginning of the end of German Jewry

1933

< 30 MARCH 1933
1 APRIL 1933 >

Friday
31 March 1933

Pass to visit the police prisoner Alfred Binswanger

Shortly before the nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April, large numbers of people were arrested in Regensburg and other German cities. The factory owner Alfred Binswanger was among those taken into custody on 30 March 1933. This pass, which was issued to his wife Lina the next day, entitled her to visit him in the prison and talk "for ten minutes under supervision."

The SS released the seventy-three year-old the same day due to his age. On 11 April, nearly two weeks later, Binswanger wrote in a report that ten to fifteen of the 124 people arrested were still being held in prison.

Binswanger came from a family of liqueur producers and ran their factory in Regensburg. He died in November 1933, three years before the family was forced to sell the successful company.

Franziska Bogdanov

Categorie(s): businessmen | captivity | Regensburg
Pass to visit the police prisoner Alfred Binswanger, Regensburg, 31 March 1933
Gift of Danny L. Goldberg

An unexpected gift

In 2010 the Jewish Museum in Berlin received a large collection of papers from the Binswanger family‘s estate, donated by one of their descendants, Danny L. Goldberg. The collection contains many written documents but no photographs of Alfred Binswanger. This year Mr. Goldberg helped the museum make contact with Mara Fazio, Alfred Binswanger‘s great-granddaughter, who donated this photograph of her great grandfather, taken around 1931, to the Jewish Museum just a few weeks ago.

Alfred Binswanger (1860–1933), ca. 1931
Gift of Mara Fazio 
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