05/26/2026
Joan Nathan listens as Moriah of the Ackman and Ziff Family Genealogy Institute at the Center for Jewish History reveals the story of Maria (Sometimes referred to as Marie) Bernheim née Nathan, a relative she never knew.
Born in Ulm, Germany in 1873, Maria lived through the systematic destruction of her family's life under the N**i regime.
The Bernheim family's chemical factory was among the first Jewish-owned businesses in Germany to be Aryanized, seized by N**i authorities on the back of false charges of foreign exchange fraud and tax evasion leveled against Maria's husband Siegfried and his their sons.
The accusations were a fabrication, a calculated smear campaign designed to justify expropriation, but that did not stop the local press from running damning headlines that publicly vilified Siegfried and his family.
The charges were a lie, but the damage was real and permanent. W***y, one of Maria and Siegfried's three sons, bore the worst of it, wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for two years. Siegfried himself was spared prison but was fined and left humiliated, his reputation destroyed by a false narrative engineered by the N**i state.
The family was Maria and Siegfried were forced to quietly flee Augsburg, taking refuge in Munich. By 1938, all three of Maria's sons had escaped Germany, but Maria could not follow. On June 4, 1942, she was deported to Theresienstadt, the ghetto-camp 30 miles north of Prague where prisoners aged 60 and above received the smallest food rations.
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