Returned objects from the property of Henny and Siegfried Insel

The Oldenburg Insel family and their painful fate under the tyranny of the Nazi regime

The businessman Siegfried Insel, born in Berne in 1859, and his wife Henny, born in Hameln in 1873, had moved from the Wesermarsch to the nearby town of Oldenburg in 1903. The family initially lived at Lange Straße 57, where Siegfried Insel founded a store for men’s and boys’ fashion. The couple had two children: Grete, born in Berne in 1903, and Hermann, who was born in Oldenburg in 1910. In 1911, the family of four moved into a large old apartment in the so-called “Yellow Castle” at the renowned Roggemannstraße 25, where Siegfried Insel then built up a successful insurance agency. From 1924 to 1933, he represented the insurance company Rhein-Mosel as its main agent in Oldenburg. But in 1934 he lost his position as a representative. Siegfried Insel was still listed as a merchant in the city’s commercial register until 1935. After that, his buisiness entries in the Oldenburg address book also came to an end.

In consideration of political events and their personal situation, it becomes clear that the Insel couple involuntarily had to part with many things and reduce their household items in order to minimise their relocation goods as early as 1936, when they were forced to move from a very large flat in Oldenburg to a small flat elsewhere. Henny and Siegfried Insel’s bitterness with these unintended circumstances is expressed in their later list of items to be moved to Amsterdam, which was demanded by the foreign currency office. The giving away of very personal objects to a family friend should be understood in this context, as should the sale of household goods to the Landesmuseum Oldenburg. Due to the very private nature of the items, the couple presumably did not consider the pewter jug and the silver wedding jewellery worth selling. Given the burdensome circumstances, the gift from Henny and Siegfried Insel to their non-Jewish Oldenburg friends at the time must indeed be considered as a case of “Nazi-confiscation” due to their persecution, even if the exact circumstances can no longer be traced in detail. However, it is very likely that under other circumstances the Insel family would not have had any reason to part with these personal possessions, which hold very private memories and are part of their family history.

The search for the descendants and the return of the objects

The City of Oldenburg therefore decided to search for the heirs of Henny and Siegfried Insel and to offer to them a restitution, i.e. the return of these collection items. After extensive search for traces, provenance researcher Sabine Stührholdt at the Stadtmuseum was finally able to find living descendants of three of Siegfried’s siblings who live in Israel and the United States of America: a grandson of his brother Emil, the widow of a grandson of his sister Sophie and several great-grandchildren of his brother Gustav. They reacted differently to the unexpected contact and the offer to return the memorabilia: with astonishment, with silence, with sadness and shock in the face of the immeasurable injustice that Henny, Siegfried, Grete and Hermann had suffered – but also with gratitude for the reappraisal of their moving story and with joy at the belated memory of them. The first contacts developed into a lively exchange.

The restituted objects are now being kept in Israel by Reuven Shoer, the grandnephew of Henny and Siegfried Insel. But for the future, the descendants have together decided that the pewter jug and the wedding jewelry should return to Oldenburg again so that they can continue to remind us of the life and fate of the Oldenburg Insel family in our future permanent exhibition on the city’s history – and thus also of the immeasurable injustice done to so many other Jewish families under the tyranny of the National Socialist regime.