The Jewish couple Johanna Löwy née Schönbrunn, and Rudolf Löwy had three sons who were born in Salzburg:
• Otto on June 24, 1883,
• Ernst September 5, 1890 and
• Ludwig on February 14, 1892
– thy were one of the approximately 50 Jewish families who were able to acquire the local citizenship »Heimatrecht« in the city of Salzburg under the Austro-Hungarian Constitution.
The local citizen registration records, the »Heimatmatrik«1, show that their sons Otto, Ernst and Ludwig LÖWY, graduates of the Realschule in Salzburg and officers in the Austro-Hungarian Army in the First World War, also started families.
The couple Alice and Otto LÖWY had a daughter: Lilly, born in Salzburg on December 29, 1917.
The couple Helene and Ludwig LÖWY also had a daughter: Liselotte, born in Salzburg on April 26, 1924.
The couple Hilda and Ernst LÖWY also had a daughter: Liane (Lia), born in Czech Republic Teplice (formerly Teplitz-Schönau, Bohemia) on February 15, 1928
The brothers Otto, Ernst and Ludwig LÖWY were partners and junior managers of their father’s company Rudolf Löwy OHG, founded in 1882: which was a flourishing and crisis-proof coal dealership until the violent year of 1938.
The business and residential address of the senior partner, Rudolf Löwy, remained unchanged for a long time: 5 Hubert-Sattler-Gasse, first floor – in a Vienna style building with an open courtyard and passageways out to the Faber-Straße and the Franz-Josef-Straße. It was named after its developer Josef Heller.2
In antisemitic Salzburg, the Heller Houses and the adjacent Faber houses on the Rainerstraße were called »Jew houses« – presumably because of their Viennese builders and well-off residents, including Jewish families.
In any case, Salzburg’s residents knew that Rudolf Löwy was president of the Salzburg Jewish Community Organization (founded in 1911) for a good 20 years, from 1911 to 1919 and from 1924 to 1935.
The company’s name and address were prominently displayed on the boycott list that the Salzburg Antisemitic League published in every edition of its hate publication The Iron Broom – with the declared aim of eliminating the existence of all Jews in their place of residence.
When Rudolf Löwy received the Honorary Gold Star for Services to the Republic of Austria from the Austrian Federal President in 1929, Salzburg’s antisemites reacted with hateful polemics:
Zionsstern der Judenrepublik [Zion-Star of the »Jew Republic«]
The Iron Broom, August 2, 1929, p. 5
The Austrian Republic lacked sufficient resistance to antisemitism – with serious consequences for the Salzburg Jewish Community: a sharp decline in births and marriages, the last of which took place in September 1933 (!).
On July 7, 1935 the senior partner of his company and honorary president of his religious community Rudolf Löwy died at age 78 — just a few weeks after the death of his wife Johanna on May 24th. They were buried in the Salzburg Jewish cemetery (death notices of the bereaved).
On May 12, 1935, while his parents were still alive, their 51 years-old eldest son Otto LÖWY, was elected president of the official Jewish Community Organization.
The brothers Otto, Ernst and Ludwig LÖWY jointly managed their company in the house at 5 Hubert-Sattler-Gasse and also acquired a warehouse in the Schallmoos neighborhood (land register EZ 464).
The company, founded in 1882, was forcibly liquidated by the Nazi regime after the annexation of Austria by Germany, thus destroying the means of existence of the LÖWY brothers in their birthplace and place of residence, Salzburg.
The beneficiaries of the robbery were Ernst Reh & Co. (the store at 5 Hubert-Sattler-Gasse) and Franz Flöckner (the warehouse in Schallmoos). Fuller attention should rather be paid to their victims and their traumatic experiences.
After the so-called »Kristallnacht« pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, the brothers Otto, Ernst and Ludwig LÖWY were arrested by the Salzburg Gestapo and imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp. They were released on December 5, 1938 – but only after they signed an agreement that they and their families would leave the country.
The robbed and expelled families found places as »illegal refugees« in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine.
At the beginning of the wartime year 1941, Alice and Otto LÖWY managed to travel from Tel Aviv to the USA via Egypt. Their destination was Philadelphia, the refuge of their married daughter Lilly Moldauer, who had three children in the USA: Joanne, Ralph, and Carol.
Among the few Jews who dared to start a new life after the war back at the place of their expulsion was the couple Helene and Ludwig LÖWY. Their married daughter Liselotte Papo however, stayed in her place of refuge for family reasons: in Tel Aviv (Israel after May 1948).
Helene and Ludwig LÖWY were 50 and 60 years old respectively when they returned to Salzburg to try to resume their family business at 5 Hubert-Sattler-Gasse in March 1952 – after a 14-year long forced interruption.
The LÖWYs first had to re-establish the Rudolf Löwy company, which had been liquidated under the Nazi regime. The new company regained its traditional name, but had a different address: 21 Turnerstraße in the Gnigl neighborhood.
The new address shows that the efforts of the LÖWY couple to recover their stolen business and storage premises were unsuccessful.
Despite all the adversities and the antisemitic hostility that they had to contend with, Helene and Ludwig LÖWY managed to gain a permanent foothold in Salzburg and restore the Rudolf Löwy company to prominence – a key concern of the couple, as their memoirs reveal.
Opposition to anti-Semitism was a primary task of the survivors, one which Ludwig LÖWY also felt obliged to wage as a committed member of the Jewish Community of Salzburg.
In the years 1967/68 Ludwig LÖWY was president of the Community and its honorary president in his later years – as his father Rudolf Löwy had been before him.
Ludwig LÖWY died at the age of 88 on February 1, 1981, followed by his wife Helene at the age of 93 on May 17, 1995. They died in Salzburg, but both are buried in Israel – in Tel Aviv where their daughter Liselotte Papo lived.
It should be added that there were already two graves of the Löwy family in the Jewish cemetery in Salzburg, only one of which survived the Nazi destruction: the grave of the married couple Johanna and Rudolf Löwy, who died in 1935. The grave of Oswald Löwy, a brother of Rudolf Löwy, who also died in 1935, disappeared during the terror years – one Jewish gravestone among the many that were stolen, sold and disposed of by the family that was given ownership of the Jewish cemetery by the Nazi regime [the ownership of the devastated cemetery was restored to the Jewish Community by the American occupation authorities after the war].
Amalie LÖWY, Oswald’s widow, and his nephew Ernst LÖWY with his wife Ida and their son Herbert, were expelled from Salzburg during the November pogrom of 1938, but they were unable to reach safety in exile and became victims of the Shoah.
1 The »Heimatmatrik« have to serve as a replacement source for the birth and marriage registers of the Jewish Community of Salzburg because they were destroyed by the Nazi regime.
2 The »Heller Houses« (named after Josef Heller, who died in Salzburg in 1930) are 5, 7, & 9 Hubert-Sattler-Gasse (EZ 68, 102, 104), 6 and 8 Franz-Josef-Straße (EZ 101, 103) and 9 and 11 Faberstraße (EZ 105, 106), builders Heller & Company, 1890 Löwenfeld & Hofmann brothers, 1912 Eugenie Pongracz and Amelie Hervay-Kirchberg, 1920 Samuel Gump and Eugen Weil (Zurich), 1970 City of Salzburg
Sources
- Israelitische Kultusgemeinde/Jewish Community Salzburg (Births and marriage registers destroyed by the Nazi regime)
- Salzburg City and State Archives: Residents’ register, home register, land register, business and victim welfare files, list of Aryanized assets (Dr. Josef Weiss, August 2, 1945)
- Salzburgs wiederaufgebaute Synagoge, Festschrift zur Einweihung, Judaica Verlag, Salzburg 1968
- Albert Lichtblau: »Arisierungen«, beschlagnahmte Vermögen, Rückstellungen und Entschädigungen in Salzburg, Vienna-Munich 2004, pp. 160-163
- Dossier Liselotte Löwy-Papo mit Erinnerungen ihrer Eltern (Tel Aviv, September 2009)
- Arolsen Archives: KZ-Haft Otto, Ernst and Ludwig Löwy
- Anno: Austrian Newspapers online
Translation: Stan Nadel
Stumbling Stone
Laid 08.10.2025 at Salzburg, Hubert-Sattler-Gasse 5
