23Ghetto House

Since 1996, a memorial plaque has commemorated the Jewish residents of the building who were
persecuted and murdered during the Nazi era. The building had been owned by the Ortweiler/Appel family since 1894, who ran a leather store on the lower floor. From 1941, it was used by the National Socialists as a so-called Jews' house. Jews were forced to leave their apartments and houses and move into designated ghetto houses, where they had to live together with strangers in very confined spaces. At Brühl 6, members of eight families shared the upper floor of the house and the ghettoization was a precursor to the deportations that began in autumn 1941. The Gestapo could easily monitor the residents and used even the slightest misconduct for arrests. In September 1941, Susanna Appel was arrested in her parents' house for unauthorized possession of a few eggs. A year later, she was murdered in Auschwitz. Martin Wolff was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp for riding his bicycle without permission and was murdered in the Bernburg killing center on March 14, 1942. Most of the residents were deported to the Belzyce ghetto near Lublin in May 1942. Some elderly people remained in Brühl 6 until their deportation to Theresienstadt in September 1942.