Wilhelm Mühsam, an ophthalmologist, took the lease on a 10-room apartment on the third floor in autumn 1939. He lived here with his wife Paula Rosalie and their eldest son Heinrich. Two of their children managed to emigrate. Wilhelm Mühsam died in October 1939 and his widow took over the lease.

18 people lived in the apartment for a time. Another ophthalmologist, Erich Weinberg, used some of the rooms to treat patients but did not live there. From 1940 on, Paula Mühsam sublet one of the rooms to husband-and-wife Kurt und Else Rathenau, who had lived at Kurfürstenstraße 115/116 since 1910. Kurt Rathenau was a nephew of Emil Rathenau, founder of the electrical engineering company AEG, and cousin of Walther Rathenau, the German foreign minister assassinated in 1922. A former commercial court judge at Berlin regional court, Kurt Rathenau had been jailed for over a month in Sachsenhausen concentration camp after the November pogroms of 1938. He was evidently arrested again in June 1942 as he spent ten days in the police prison on Alexanderplatz before being deported with his wife on June 23, 1942, probably to the Minsk ghetto and then to Maly Trostinez extermination camp, where they were most likely murdered on arrival. The Rathenaus’ belongings – including a library of 950 books – were sold at auction to the highest bidder the following year. The proceeds of the auction amounted to RM 21,547.00.

Six other subtenants of the apartment were deported on the same transport on June 23, 1942: Elsbeth Epstein, Franz Eugen Ludwig Fuchs, Johanna Graubart, a widow, and her son Kurt, and husband-and-wife Tana and Denny Scheibner. Elsbeth Epstein had moved into the apartment in June 1941 after she had been forced to sell her house to a department of the Luftwaffe. Dr. Franz Eugen Fuchs, a lawyer and notary, had been vice president of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith from 1933 to 1938 and worked for the Reich Association since the November pogroms of 1938. Denny Scheibner, a former government building adviser, had been held in a corrective labor camp before he was deported.

Paula Mühsam also sublet a room to the renowned pediatrician Oscar Rosenberg and his wife Charlotte Rosenberg, the daughter of Mathilde Fuchs. Oscar Rosenberg had run the pediatrics department of the Jewish hospital on Iranische Straße from 1933 to 1941. In 1941 he took over as head of the Jewish infant orphanage in Niederschönhausen. Oscar and Charlotte Rosenberg were deported on September 10, 1943, with the “61st transport of the elderly” to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Charlotte Rosenberg died here after a short time. Oscar Rosenberg continued to work as a pediatrician in the ghetto and survived. He died in 1963 in Berlin.

Another subtenant in the apartment was Ida Ingeborg Meinhardt. She was deported on January 25, 1942, to the Riga ghetto, where she died ten months later.

Hugo Chaim Rosenthal, a 91-year-old, care-dependent, retired judge, moved into a room in Paula Mühsam’s apartment in 1942. He died the following year in the Jewish hospital on Iranische Straße. He had been scheduled to be deported on the “91st transport of the elderly” to the Theresienstadt ghetto, which left three days after his death.

Luise Johanna Cannedt, Martha Holländer, and Rosa Rosenzweig also lived in the apartment. Luise Cannedt moved into one room in November 1941. The three women, all widows, were deported with Paula Mühsam on June 30, 1942, on the “12th transport of the elderly” to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Luise Johanna Cannedt and Martha Holländer died some weeks or months afterwards; Paula Mühsam after almost a year. Rosa Rosenzweig was deported further to Auschwitz, where she was murdered. Paula’s son Heinrich Mühsam was deported on June 30, 1942, to the Theresienstadt ghetto and murdered in Auschwitz on September 20, 1944.

Gertrud Baer, née Holländer, took the lease on the apartment on the fifth floor in 1941. A widow, she lived here with her mother Martha Holländer. To avoid deportation, Gertrud Baer went into hiding in 1942. Late that year, the police found her in a cellar with two other Jewish people who had gone underground. They were all deported on January 12, 1943, to Auschwitz. When the apartment was cleared out, Martha Holländer and their subtenant Rosa Rosenzweig, née Löwenstein, moved in to Paula Mühsam’s apartment on the third floor.

Margarete Rosenthal, née Holländer, seems to have lived as a subtenant in an apartment in the rear building. It is likely she was another daughter of Martha Holländer, who lived in the street-facing building. Margarete Rosenthal was deported on October 19, 1942, from Gormannstraße 3 to the Riga ghetto, where she was murdered. Her son Herbert, who seems to have lived elsewhere, was deported on the same transport.

Gert Blach lived as a subtenant in the apartment. He had been jailed for several months for “pursuing a trade” and “acquiring rationed products” on the black market. Having served his sentence, he was deported on August 24, 1943, to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.

Adolf Cohn, an architect, had both his home and office at Kurfürstenstraße 116. Here, Cohn ran the long-established building firm “Adolf Cohn Architekt und Baugeschäft”, which was deleted from the commercial register in June 1938. Adolf Cohn lived on Kurfürstenstraße until he was forced to move in summer 1942 – to which address is unclear. But records show that he was deported on June 16, 1943, to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where he died a few months later.

Lina Giesener and her son Heinz, a carpenter, and Laura Kusselewski, née Kaiser, also lived at Kurfürstenstraße 115. Lina Giesener was deported on November 14, 1941, to Minsk. Laura Kusselewski was deported with the subsequent transport, two weeks later, to Riga, where she was shot during a massacre of 1053 deported Jews on November 30. Heinz Giesener apparently performed forced labor in Bielefeld. He was arrested there on February 26, 1943, during the Nazis’ nationwide “Factory Action” and deported on March 2 to Auschwitz, where he was again deployed as a forced laborer. He was deported on January 18, 1945, to an unknown destination. No further record of his whereabouts or what happened to him has survived.

Charlotte Holländer, probably a daughter of Martha Holländer who lived in the street-facing building, evidently also lived at Kurfürstenstraße 115 for a time. In October 1941, Charlotte Holländer moved to Elsässer Straße 85, where there was an office of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany. She stated in her declaration of assets that she was a “nursing home director” there. She was deported on June 28, 1943, to Auschwitz but survived the concentration camp and emigrated to the United States after the war.

In 1939, SS Sturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann set up an office for “Jewish affairs and evacuation” (IV B 4), at Kurfürstenstraße 115/116), which was known as “Judenreferat” or “Eichmann-Referat”. It was a sub-department of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA). From autumn 1941 on, the “Judenreferat” organized all the deportations of Jews from Germany and the German-occupied countries of Europe. The department’s significance was reflected in its imposing premises on Kurfürstenstraße. The offices were reached via a grand staircase or elevator. The entrance was guarded by several sentries and a pass was needed to enter the building.

The offices of Friedrich Suhr, a senior officer in the “Judenreferat”, and other leading SS men were on the second floor, along with a hall for meetings and receptions. Eichmann’s offices and those of his deputy Rolf Günther were on the third floor. Members of staff even temporarily lived in rooms in the residential building at Kurfürstenstraße 115/116, including Eichmann himself. Some rooms were reserved for visiting members of the SS.

In the early 1940s, the department’s activities shifted from compelling Jews to emigrate to organizing deportations.

People categorized as “privileged Jews”, i.e., those “of mixed race” or spouses in “mixed marriages” with non-Jewish partners, were deployed as forced laborers at Kurfürstenstraße 115/116. The “Kurfürstenstraße Jewish work crew” was initially assigned renovation work. An apprentice named Walter Frankenstein later recalled that Eichmann threatened to deport him to Auschwitz if he left any spots of plaster on the carpet while he was plastering over the telephone cables in Eichmann’s office. Soon the forced laborers were made to build bunker systems, dig ditches for fire-extinguishing water, clear rubble after air-raids, and carry out repairs. Forced laborers worked up to 14 hours per day on the bunker construction site.