Another Prominent Jewish Crisis Victim in Germany: One-time Millionaire President of Chemnitz Jewish

Another prominent German Jew has fallen a victim to the economic crisis. Herr Georg Mecklenburg, at one time a millionaire manufacturer, and President of the Jewish Community of Chemnitz, has shot himself because his business, one of the largest paint and varnish concerns in the city, was facing a crash.

Herr Mecklenburg, who was 63 years of age, was one of the leaders of the extreme Reform tendency in the Jewish Community and a bitter antagonist of Zionism, which he considered a danger to Jewish emancipation.

Reports are arriving here almost daily from various provincial towns of well-known Jews there driven to suicide by the economic crisis.

One of the most sensational cases of one-time millionaire Jewish industrialists in Germany, driven to suicide by the economic crisis was that of Dr. Eduard Simon, a cousin of Dr. James Simon, the President of the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden, who killed himself in August 1929. Everyone followed with sincere sympathy the desperate fight which Dr. Simon waged in his attempt to save his firm from ruin, the “Berliner Montagspost” wrote at the time. When we learned that the estate of Eduard Simon had to be sold by auction, we knew that one of the most splendid and most honest men in Berlin industry was facing ruin.

Among the big Jewish firms that crashed recently in Germany was the Hirsch Copper Company, one of the largest metal concerns in Germany, which found itself in serious difficulties last September. The proprietors of the firm were Aaron Hirsch, a leading orthodox Jew in Berlin, his son Siegfried Hirsch, a prominent Zionist, and Adolf Shoyer, a member of the Board of the Berlin Jewish Community. It was stated to be the only concern of its size in the whole of Germany in which all work was completely suspended on Saturdays.