Hamburger, Emanuel.

Hamburger, Emanuel, born 08-08-1901 in Nijkerk,   Netherlands, to Bernard Hamburger and his wife Jeanette Mendels. Emanuel was a master of law and unmarried. Emanuel was chairman of the SDAP  in Dordrecht. The Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) was an influential Dutch socialist party that existed from 1894 to 1946. The party aimed for better living conditions for workers and worked there as a teacher at the HBS.

Hamburger held numerous social positions in Dordrecht. In this photo, he (standing third from the left) is a board member of the Dordrecht branch of the SDAP.

There he was dismissed due to the anti-Jewish measures of the occupier. In September 1941, he is photographed as one of the teachers at the Jewish Lyceum in Rotterdam.   A school established by the Nazis for students from Rotterdam and the surrounding area.

Emanuel still lived in Dordrecht at Singel 42. According to his card with the Jewish Council, he was a legal advisor to the Jewish Council. In the autumn of 1942, Emanuel went into hiding in Rotterdam. The position at the Jewish Lyceum was only part of Emanuel’s activities and he probably did not hold it for long.

In this building on the Vlak in Dordrecht, the jurist Emanuel Hamburger had his office, until anti-Jewish measures prevented him from doing so.

Emanuel was also in the resistance and managed to stay out of the Nazis’ hands for a long time. He actively helped with assistance for people in hiding and with the distribution of illegal literature. Emanuel was recognized by a former student who worked for the Sicherheitsdienst, Security Service, betrayed, and arrested in Rotterdam on 12-06-1944.

Death and burial ground of Emanuel Hamburger.

Emanuel was imprisoned at the police station Haagse Veer and then transferred to the penal prison in Scheveningen, the “Oranjehotel.” Just before the end of the war, on 18-02-1945, Emanuel was transferred to Heinenoord, where he was executed in reprisal for the attack on the NSB mayor of Nieuw Beijerland, Martinus Adrianus Simonis.

While the vast majority of Jewish Dordtenaren met their deaths in foreign concentration camps, Emanuel Hamburger, age 41, died near his hometown, in a grim location: at the height of Heinenoord, right on the national highway that cuts thru the wide polders of the Hoeksche Waard. Together with nine fellow sufferers, he was coldly executed there, at the age of 43, in the early morning of 18-02-1945, by a German firing squad, with 20 other Jewisch victims– as retaliation for an attack in which Hamburger and the others had neither participated nor had any part. Emanuel Hamburger is not the only Jewish person from Dordrecht who was executed. Fatal bullets also struck Abraham “Bob” Wijnberg, age 29, for example, on 29-07-1943, on the Leusderheide. But what makes the death of Hamburger, a teacher at the municipal hbs, doubly bitter is that it was brought about by one of his former students. He betrayed his teacher indifferently, while Hamburger had dedicated himself so devotedly and completely to “especially the youth,” as high school director Dr. J.J. Prins recalled at Hamburger’s reburial in Dordrecht.  The monument along the highway near Heinenoord, close to the spot where Hamburger was executed.

Emanuel Hamburger was reburied in October 1945, in the presence of many guests, at the General Cemetery in Dordrecht.

After a fieldgrave Emanuel was still “a dignified grave.” Hundreds of interested parties attend the “moving ceremony.” as he was reburied at the General Cemetery in Dordrecht. Klazienaveensestraat, Nieuw-Dordrecht.

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