Praxis für Allgemeinmedizin Dr. med. Leopold Liebenthal
The physician Dr. Leopold Liebenthal settled in Wismar on 25 October 1894, opened a practice at Hinter dem Rathaus 5 and later moved it to his house at Altwismarstraße 21, which today bears the number 10 [2]. He was known as the doctor of the poor, and in Wismar people said (in Low German) that Liebenthal always comes [1][2]. Although he had been baptised in 1898, he was persecuted as a Jew, for his practice was closed [1][2], on 21 November 1938 he was ordered to pay an "atonement levy" of 5,000 Reichsmark [1] and on 29 November 1938 his property was secured, before he died on 30 November 1938 [1][2].
The practice
Leopold Liebenthal was born on 26 May 1868 in Bergen on Rügen, the son of the merchant Louis Liebenthal [1][2]. He passed the medical state examination in Berlin in 1894 and took his doctorate in Leipzig the same year [1][2]. On 25 October 1894 he settled in Wismar as a general practitioner and first opened a practice at Hinter dem Rathaus 5. After he had bought the house at Altwismarstraße 21, which bears the number 10 in the later numbering, he moved the practice there and lived there himself as well [2]. The Stadtarchiv gives Altwismarstraße 10 directly as the practice address [1]. In 1919 the household included, besides his family, his sister-in-law Antonie Spohr and a housemaid [2]. On 10 August 1898 he was baptised in St. Marien and married Marie Spohr, who was 24 years old, although the Stadtarchiv gives no year of the wedding and according to Schmidt the wedding took place on 21 September 1899 in Schwerin [1][2]. The sons Emil, born 1902, and Helmut, born 1907, were raised as Christians [2].
Liebenthal was held in high esteem above all by the poor population. He partly did not bill treatments and, according to the biographies, even paid necessary medicines out of his own pocket, so that in Wismar people said: Liebenthal always comes [1][2]. He was repeatedly elected representative of the small Jewish community in Wismar and joined the Masonic lodge in 1895 [2].
Persecution 1933 to 1938
After the Nazi takeover in 1933 his practice was closed and he was forbidden to practise [1]. The text of 12 November 2016 printed in Hansen's compilation describes several Gestapo interrogations, followed by the ban on medical work and the closing of the practice [2], but an exact date of the closing is not known, so that it remains open whether it took place in 1933 or only later [1][2]. Because the practice was already closed, he escaped, according to this account, the destruction of 10 November 1938 in which shops owned by Jews were wrecked, whereas his son Helmut was among the Jewish men taken into "protective custody" on 10 November 1938 [2].
On 21 November 1938 Liebenthal was ordered to pay an "atonement levy" of 5,000 Reichsmark, which Jews had to pay for the damage they themselves had suffered in the pogrom [1]. On 29 November 1938 followed a "securing order for the protection of the assets of Jewish citizens", and his property was seized on suspicion of intended emigration, according to Schmidt including the house [1][2]; whether and how the house was dealt with afterwards is not stated in the sources, but it was destroyed in the Second World War [2]. The next day, 30 November 1938, he died of heart failure at the age of 70 [1][2].
Funeral and remembrance
According to the Stadtarchiv the funeral procession was followed by only two persons because of pressure from the National Socialists, and many people in Wismar honoured him by happening to be "busy" along the streets or at the cemetery [1]. Schmidt, on the other hand, speaks of hundreds [2]. Leopold Liebenthal was buried with his wife in the west cemetery in Wismar [2]. A street in Wismar bears his name, the council decision dating from 9 February 1961 according to Hansen, whereas Schmidt gives the year 1991 [2]. A memorial plaque was placed at the house, and a Stolperstein lies in front of Altwismarstraße 10, although the sources contradict each other on the date of its laying, naming 15 July 2008 and 10 August 2013 [2][3].