Georg Oppel

„My husband was rounded up with other employees at the East Berlin employment office in Boxhagenerstraße by the Lichtenberg SA on 29th March 1933 and brought to Columbia Haus under the circumstances that were standard at the time. [...] According to what my husband later said, which was confirmed by his visible injuries, he was put on a trestle and hit with whips and bars. He sustained severe damage to his kidneys which made him unfit for work. [...] He later underwent an operation but it did not help.“

Olga Oppel 1952



Georg Oppel, an office worker from a Jewish family, was already a member of the SPD when he started working for the Wilmersdorf district authority in 1919. In 1920, he was elected to the council and in 1921 he became a salaried city councillor. However, his post was abolished by Wilmersdorf council, in which the centre-right parties held the majority, as part of the Prussian personnel reforms of 1924. Following his temporary retirement, in 1926 and 1930, he was re-elected unsalaried local councillor in Wilmersdorf. In 1928 he became acting director of the East Berlin employment exchange and later assumed the post full-time. He was re-elected to Wilmersdorf assembly in the snap elections of 1933, brought forward by Hitler following his appointment as Chancellor. After the SPD was banned in June 1933 and the Decree for Safety of the Leadership of State was passed in July, he was unseated and barred from working as a district councillor. In late March 1933, Oppel was arrested by the SA and subjected to physical abuse at the Gestapo prison in Columbia Haus, Tempelhof. He was suspended from Wilmersdorf council before his term as an unpaid city councillor came to an end, labelled Jew, Social Democrat. On 30.6.1933, he was given notice of his dismissal from the Reich employment agency. In August 1933, this was changed into an instant dismissal from the post of director of the employment office. He was unable to work after being released from detention and at first was not even able to draw his pension. Later, he received a “precarious” pension of 99 Reichmarks a month, which the authorities reserved the right to revoke at any time. He died in Berlin in 1936 as a result of the injuries he had sustained in detention. His widow Olga Oppel did not receive any pension for a year, then 55 Reichmarks a month. Their son Adolf was barred from working as a lawyer in 1933 and their daughter Liselotte lost her job when the trade unions were disbanded. She was arrested and deported in 1942. The last Olga Oppel heard from her daughter was from Riga prison in 1943.

Georg Oppel was a city councillor from 1925 – 1926; Constituency 9 Wilmersdorf (SPD)