Stumbling Stones in Chemnitz
Karl and Marianne Otto
Karl Otto
Born: 08/06/1902
Died: 18 October 1978
Marianne Otto, née Schubert
Born: 19.04.1906
Died: 06/04/1998
Installation location:
Würzburger Straße 25
Stumbling stone laying on:
20 September 2025
Life path
The editor, lyricist and cultural functionary Karl Otto was one of the prisoners of the Sachsenburg concentration camp who not only wrote down their memories of their imprisonment on site, but also later wrote extensively about the history of the camp and its victims.
Friedrich Karl Otto was born in Chemnitz as the sixth child of Bruno Otto and Alma Claußner. His father was a municipal official. After attending
After attending secondary school, he began an apprenticeship in a law firm in 1916. However, he soon disliked "the colourless air of criminal files, fascicles and law books" in the law firm on the market square and the associated narrowness of a "bourgeois career".
During the First World War, the lawyer's clerk finally lost his faith in God. Walther, his eldest brother and role model, had died of serious gunshot wounds in a war hospital in France in December 1917. Karl immediately left the church. The turmoil of the November Revolution of 1918/19 caused him to finally distance himself from the world of the petty bourgeoisie, while at the same time he thought he had recognised the "half-measures of the new republic". At the beginning of 1924, Otto travelled to Grünheide near Berlin to accept an invitation from the writer Georg Kaiser. He became his private secretary for just under a year. In December 1924, he was forced to return to Chemnitz in the wake of growing publishing difficulties. Otto initially took a job as a postal assistant before becoming a despatch messenger. He returned to live with his parents on the Sonnenberg at Würzburger Straße 25, but for him it was more of a "sunless neighbourhood".
a "sunless neighbourhood"; the locals spoke disparagingly of the "Thälmann Gorge".
In 1925, Otto became a member of the KPD and the Red Front Fighters' League. He also made himself available as a speaker to the Proletarian Freethinkers' Association
as a speaker.
On 22 October 1927, Karl Otto married Klara Marianne Schubert, a bookbinder's daughter four years his junior, who had also joined the KPD in March 1927. Marianne (known as Nanne) Otto had worked as a typist and correspondent from 1923. For a time, she was the private secretary of the respected Jewish doctor and later SPD city councillor Dr Kurt Glaser in Chemnitz. She subsequently worked as a shorthand typist for Kurt Sindermann and Fritz Selbmann. Their marriage remained childless. The couple had made a conscious decision to do so.
The Benda family was one of the Jewish families who had lived in Chemnitz for decades and helped to shape Jewish life.
The merchant Josef Benda moved to Chemnitz in the autumn of 1886. Until then, the shoe merchant had lived in Münchengrätz (Bohemia). Together with his wife Cäcilie Sandheim, he had three sons: Hugo, Willy and Hans. All three were Jewish soldiers on the German side in the First World War. Hugo Benda founded a woollen goods factory in 1921 with two other merchants under the name Benda & Co. After the death of one partner and the departure of another, Hugo Benda became the sole owner. As such, he converted the company into a mechanical woollen goods factory and sold men's waistcoats and sports socks nationwide under the trademark "Stabil Qualitätsware". The three-storey residential and commercial building at Zieschestraße 13, in which the factory premises were located, became the property of the company around 1923.
On 3 January 1924, Hugo Benda married Florentine Louise Marie Krug. Four years later, his wife gave birth to a girl in the state women's clinic.
into the world. She was given the first name Eugenie Margot Ilse. The family found a suitable flat at Henriettenstraße 50 around 1932.
Immediately after the transfer of power to the NSDAP on 30 January 1933, murderous violence against opponents of the regime and Jews also began in Chemnitz. Some of them were deported to the notorious "Hansa-Haus restaurants" in the city centre and abused there.
When a nationwide "boycott of Jews" was called for on 1 April 1933, Hugo Benda was arrested off the street and detained and abused for three days. It is not known whether the factory owner was tortured in the "Hansa House". The "Jewish boycott" had clear consequences. Sales figures fell drastically. Hugo Benda was forced to file for bankruptcy on 11 June 1934. The proceedings only lasted until 9 July 1934, when his workers marched in front of the residential building on Kaßberg and bid farewell to their patron, "silently with their caps pulled down", writes Ilse Rau, née Benda, in her autobiography "Meine Mara-Jahre" (My Mara Years). The company entry was only deleted from the commercial register on 27 April 1937.
By this time, Hugo Benda was no longer alive. He had died of cancer on 4 May 1936. Although he had been admitted to a municipal hospital, as a Jew he was denied the necessary radiotherapy. His daughter was not present at his burial in the Jewish cemetery - for fear of being attacked. From then on, Ilse lived with different working families at the former Benda textile factory.
She initially attended the André School for Girls on the Kaßberg. When the Jewish pupils had to leave the primary schools at Whitsun 1938, Ilse also became a pupil.
Ilse also became a pupil in the "Jewish special classes". There she met the teacher Leo Elend, with whom she remained in contact until his death on 8 March 1939.
As a "Geltungsjüdin", Marie Benda was banned from working. She had to give up her middle-class flat in Henriettenstraße and was forced to move to the "Jews' house" at Theaterstraße 34, where she had to share a flat with the community nurse Edith Kahn.
Shortly after the Kristallnacht in November 1938, Marie and Ilse fled Chemnitz. In Berlin, they hoped to attract less attention and stayed temporarily with her sister-in-law.
Marie Benda looked for ways to escape Hitler's Germany. She found helpers near Aachen who took her and Ilse across the green border to Belgium in June 1939.
They both survived the war and the German occupation illegally in Brussels. Ilse mastered the new bilingualism, received support from Belgian teachers and passed her A-levels there.
At the age of twenty, Ilse Benda returned to Germany to marry Walter Rau, whom she had met as an occupying soldier in Belgium.
The marriage produced nine children. At the age of 80, she wrote down her memories. They were published in 2016 under the title "My Mara Years", just a few months before her death in December 2016.
Her mother Marie Benda returned to Germany in 1950, where she died five years later.
Author: Dr Jürgen Nitsche
As a freelance correspondent, Otto wrote court reports from July 1926 for the daily newspaper "Der Kämpfer", the newsletter of the KPD in the industrial district of
Chemnitz, Erzgebirge and Vogtland. Despite the newspaper being banned at the end of February 1933, he continued to work as a political editor underground in the neighbouring district of Burgstädt.
in the neighbouring district of Burgstädt. He was arrested there on 27 March 1933 for "illegal meetings". He remained in police custody in Burgstädt until 6 April 1933
in Burgstädt before he was transferred to the Kaßberg remand prison in Chemnitz. His wife was also arrested on 8 May 1933 and was held there until 16 May.
was held in "protective custody" at police headquarters until 16 May 1933. On 27 May 1933, Otto was transferred to the Sachsenburg concentration camp and assigned to the
assigned to the "horticulture" labour detachment. He was only released on 6 November 1933.
Otto did not find a new job. However, he continued his illegal activities as a member of the Jungbluth resistance group. An informer betrayed him and the teacher Rudolph Strauß, the later director of the Chemnitz City Archive, to the Secret State Police during this time. As a result, both were arrested on 16 October 1934 for "anti-state activities" and initially taken to the Chemnitz police prison on Hartmannstraße. From there, they were transferred ten days
transferred to Sachsenburg concentration camp ten days later. Otto was only able to return to Chemnitz on 6 December 1934.
On 24 January 1940, Otto was picked up by the Gestapo following another denunciation because an earlier conspiratorial meeting with Karl Jungbluth and Alfred Hecktheuer in 1933 had come to the attention of the investigating authorities. However, the case was dropped on 16 February 1940.
Otto was mobilised for the Wehrmacht on 12 January 1942. After completing his training, the lance corporal was transferred to railway and bridge surveillance in
Styria. On 9 May 1945, he was taken prisoner of war by the British. He was transferred to Vienna at the end of November 1945. He was able to escape from there on 21 December 1945. Six days later, he arrived in his largely destroyed hometown.
Stumbling Stones in Chemnitz
It is a project against forgetting: stumbling stones have been laid in Chemnitz every year since 2007.
Embedded in the pavement, the memorial stones commemorate the tragic fates of fellow citizens who were persecuted, deported, murdered or driven to their deaths during the National Socialist regime.
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