Where today you can see a drugstore, a shoe store had been standing here for several decades. For more than thirty years, it was owned and run by Josef Lilienfeld, a successful and well-established businessman in town, and an elected official within the Chamber of Commerce.
All of that came to a rapid end after the Nazi party had come to power. First of all, within the spirit of enforced conformity ("Gleichschaltung") new officials had to be elected in all chambers of commerce– and all Jewish officials were struck from the list of candidates; hence, in Regensburg, in Neumarkt and in Cham the chambers of commercewere made "free of Jews" ("judenfrei") as the Nazis so proudly proclaimed.
Next followed the nationwide Nazi boycott of Jewish shops and businesses, followed by various laws, such as the "Nuremberg Laws" ("Nürnberger Gesetze") affecting the "Ordinance on the Exclusion of Jews from the German Economy", the "Ordinance on the Use of Jewish Property" and the "Ordinance on the Registration of Jewish Property". Before long, 113 businesses of Jewish owners were "aryanized" in Regensburg. For the new, and undoubtedly, pro-Nazi owners it meant windfall profits, for the former owners, it spelt expropriation, humiliation, and in the end, quite often, suffering a violent death.
The five stumbling stones here illustrate what happened to the Lilienfelds and Herrschers: Erich Herrscher (managing Director of the Lilienfeld shoe store) and his wife Alma (née Abraham), as well as the young son of the Lilienfelds (born 1905) were deported to Piaski during the first deportation from Regensburg on April 2, 1942. Paul was subsequently sent to the Lublin Majdanek concentration camp for forced labour under prisoner number 7736 and died on June 22, 1942. On September 23, 1942 Paul’s mother, Ida Lilienfeld (née Grünhut) was deported to Theresienstadt/Terezín on 23 September, 1942 and from there to the Auschwitz concentration camp in October 1944, where she was murdered immediately after arrival. Her husband Josef Lilienfeld died on September 7, 1942, that is two weeks before he was also scheduled for deportation.
For further information about the stumbling stones in Regensburg
