Fritz Samuel Wertheimer

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Wertheimer Family
Julius Wertheimer (1882–1940)
Klara Wertheimer, née Strauß (1881–1940)
Karl Wertheimer (1915–?)
Fritz Samuel Wertheimer (1924–1943)

The Julius Wertheimer family first appeared in the Heidelberg address book in 1920. The head of the family, Julius Wertheimer, born on February 28, 1882 in Östringen, was a master tailor by profession. At that time, he operated a men’s tailoring shop at 22 Lutherstraße. From 1930 onward, the business was located at 16 Grabengasse until it was forcibly liquidated in 1934. Julius Wertheimer continued to work as a tailor and thereafter lived with his family under increasingly difficult financial circumstances.

In 1938, following the Reich Pogrom Night, he was detained in the Dachau concentration

Photographed by James Hulse, February 19, 2026

2. Fritz Samuel Wertheimer Marker

The Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones) for the Wertheimer family consist of four individual stones placed together.

camp from November 11 to December 10, 1938, like many Jewish men from Heidelberg. This so-called “protective custody” purported to protect those imprisoned from further attacks by the non-Jewish population, but in reality it was yet another National Socialist measure aimed at the persecution and humiliation of the Jewish population.

Klara Wertheimer, née Strauß, born on June 12, 1881 in Göllheim, was a housewife and mother of two sons. The older son, Karl Wertheimer, was born on February 2, 1915 in Neustadt. As a child, he was a member of the Jewish youth hiking association “Die Kameraden.” He was the only member of the family to survive the National Socialist reign of terror, which destroyed his entire family. After being interrogated several times by the Gestapo, he fled Germany for Colombia in 1937. There he married, became the father of two children, and worked as a merchant.

The second son, Fritz Samuel Wertheimer, was born on March 19, 1924 in Heidelberg. Only of him do we have photographs. Hans Flor, from whose private collection one photograph originates, was friends as a child with Fritz Wertheimer and Heinz Coßmann. All three were pupils at the Jewish school housed in the Pestalozzi School building and later in the “Judenhaus” at 3 Bunsenstraße, where Hermann Durlacher taught Jewish children after the pogrom night until their deportation in October

Photographed by James Hulse, February 19, 2026

3. Fritz Samuel Wertheimer Marker

The view of the Stolpersteine (Stumbling Blocks) along the street in front of the building.

1940. Beginning in the 1935 school year, Jewish elementary school children in Heidelberg were no longer permitted to attend regular schools. This isolation of the pupils, carried out in anticipatory obedience, did not receive its formal legal basis until two years later.

A Stolperstein (in English "stumbling block") is a ten-centimetre (four-inch) concrete cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution. The Stolpersteine project, initiated by the German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992, aims to commemorate persons at the last place that they chose freely to reside, work or study (with exceptions possible on a case-by-case basis) before they fell victim to Nazi terror, forced euthanasia, eugenics, deportation to a concentration or extermination camp, or escaped persecution by emigration or suicide. As of June 2023, 100,000 Stolpersteine have been laid, making the Stolpersteine project the world's largest decentralized memorial.