Charlotte Perutz was born May 18, 1855 in Nuremberg. She was the daughter of the merchant Salomon Lust from Königsberg and his wife Rosa, née Wertheimer. Charlotte had two brothers, Alfred and Hermann. Her first marriage was in 1878 in Königsberg to Louis Kann, who died on June 5, 1893. The marriage was childless.
On October 15, 1901, she married the chemist Otto Perutz, born July 27, 1847 in Teplitz-Schönau, North Bohemia. Otto Perutz pioneered the colour photography with the development of highly sensitive emulsion plates. He was the owner of the company „Trockenplattenfabrik München GmbH“ in Munich. Streets in Munich-Trudering and Bruckmühl-Heufeld are named after him.
Otto Perutz had already been married once; his Jewish wife Caroline died January 17, 1896 in Munich. They had six sons, of whom only one, Felix, born on February 27, 1875 in Heufeld near Rosenheim, survived childhood.
Dr. Felix Samson Perutz, Otto Perutz’s son from his first marriage, had his surgery at Sonnenstrasse 12. He held various honorary positions, including caring for the children in the Protestant orphanage in Kaulbachstrasse. In 1896 he converted from the Jewish faith to the Protestantism and married the protestant Helene Schöttle in 1902. They had a son and two daughters. After the death of his wife in 1933, he lived in the house that he owned at Königinstrasse 69. In 1935, the protestant Dr. Felix Perutz was considered a Jew by the authorities because of his Jewish origins. Deeply shaken by his exclusion from Munich society and his previous circumstances, he committed suicide on November 11, 1937. Since 2022, there has been a memorial sign for him at Königinstrasse 69.
There are several descendants of Felix still alive, e.g. his grandson Benno von Rechenberg.
Charlotte and Otto first lived at Maximiliansplatz 5, then in 1908 they moved into a stately apartment on the 1st floor of Martiusstrasse 8. The apartment covered about 300 square meters and consisted of a dining room, living room, salon, bedroom, guest room, gentleman´s room, bathroom, dressing room and two girls‘ bedrooms. According to descriptions by contemporaries, the apartment was furnished with antique furniture and in every room, there were expensive Persian carpets.
The „large dining room was equipped with heavy furniture, the chairs had high backs“. The Perutz couple also collected art, and tapestries and valuable paintings hung in the apartment.
The marriage of Otto and Charlotte Perutz remained childless, and Otto Perutz died on January 18, 1922. His widow Charlotte remained in the apartment, which she shared for a time with Anna Lust (born on February 11, 1880 in Hamburg). Anna was the wife of her brother Alfred, who had died in 1923. Anna Lust lived in Charlotte’s household from September 1925 to August 1927, from December 1930 to October 1933, and from early 1934 until her emigration to New Jersey in April 1937.
Following the Kristallnacht pogrom on November 9, 1938, the pressure of persecution for Munich’s Jews intensified. Until November 1938, Charlotte Perutz had to „hand over the jewellery and the utility silver“, „and her bank account was also blocked“.
Charlotte’s housekeeper Therese Benedikt reported the following: „At that time it was said that the carpets and paintings had been confiscated by the Nazis“ and „Mrs. Perutz is not allowed to take anything away and she is not allowed to sell anything anymore.“. Charlotte’s second housekeeper Hermine Kreilinger described the events in a witness statement in 1960 as follows: „A Mr. Alt from the Helbig company“ came who bought the paintings. „Mrs. Perutz did not get the money; it was transferred to a bank.“ „Half an hour before“ appeared „Counsellor Königsberger“ who „valued the jewellery and silverware. These things were packed and driven away after a few days.“. According to a testimony by Alice Morgenroth, a niece of Charlotte, the paintings included a portrait of a woman by Lenbach, engravings by Dürer, a work by Max Liebermann, a painting by Wouwermann, „with the famous white horses“ and „there was also a real Leibl.“. Nothing is known about the further whereabouts of this looted art and the current owners.
Since April 1939, with the withdrawal of legal tenant protection, the legal prerequisites had been created for expelling Jews from their apartments or forcibly assigning them Jewish subtenants. In addition to the exploitation of the vacant apartments, the aim of this measure was to ghettoize Munich’s Jews and cram them together in confined spaces.
From January 21, 1939, to April 1, 1939, Sabine Bachmann and Bertha Dispeker were registered with Charlotte. Bertha Dispeker previously lived at Kaulbachstrasse 26 with Mina Lewin. It remains unclear whether she lost her apartment because of her landlady’s emigration to Australia. Since the NSDAP in Munich had already evicted Jews from their apartments even before the Reich-wide legal regulation had come into force, it can be assumed that Bertha Dispeker and Sabine Bachmann were also evicted and sent to Charlotte. As a result, Charlotte Perutz had to give up two rooms, which were probably then occupied by Jews who had been evicted somewhere else.
On March 28, 1941, Charlotte Perutz, who was almost 86 years old at the time, had to leave her apartment, where she had lived for 33 years. According to the memories of the housekeeper Hermine Kreilinger, Franz Mugler, SA Obersturmführer and employee of the so-called „Aryanization Office“, came to Charlotte’s apartment beforehand. The task of the „Aryanization office“ located at the office of the Gauleiter was not only to displace the Jews from economic life but also to drive them out of their homes. Mugler „behaved very boorishly towards Mrs. Perutz and reproached me for working as a Christian for a Jewish lady. He held out the prospect that I would have to go to an munitions factory.“ Mugler wrote down all the furnishings and „said that the apartment had to be vacated within three days”.
Charlotte Perutz tried to save some objects and store them with different people. For example, she sent carpets, a table and a valuable cabinet to a Jewish acquaintance living in mixed marriages in Hohenzollernstrasse for safekeeping. A cleaning lady employed by a relative had also received carpets, a velvet curtain and a mink fur for storage. She had most of her furnishings stored with a farmer in Munich-Moosach. „She still thought she could get the furniture back if there were normal times again,“ Hermine Kreilinger recalled. Until the furniture could be removed, it was stored in the hallway of the house and in the „unprotected courtyard“, where it was „exposed to the weather“. This furniture was later destroyed by an air raid. After the entire furnishings were removed, only Charlotte’s bedroom furniture and that of a small adjoining room remained. She was initially able to take this furniture with her.
There are different reports about the further use of the apartment. While Hermine Kreilinger testified that „other Jews“ came into the „vacated apartment“ „who brought the necessary household goods with them“, the caretaker reported that the remaining rooms were occupied by the „Standartenführer Stirnweiss“. This was the camp commander of the subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp in Munich – Giesing (Agfa Kamerawerke), SS-Untersturmführer Kurt Konrad Stirnweis.
Charlotte Perutz was forced to move another five times in the coming weeks. She was first sent to the Pension Leopold at Leopoldstrasse 16, then to the Pension Royal at Bayerstrasse 25, and then went through the Jewish retirement homes at Mathildenstrasse 9 and Klenzestrasse 4. She was finally deported from the Israelite hospital at Hermann-Schmid-Strasse 7 to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where, due to the inhumane conditions according to the death report of the Council of Elders, she was sent to the old people’s home in the Kavalierkaserne on September 23, 1942 and died there of „weakness of old age and intestinal catarrh“.
Charlotte’s brother Hermann Lust, lawyer and judicial councellor, born on 13 March 1866 in Nuremberg, and his wife Emma, née Königsberger, who was born in Munich on 10 July 1870, committed suicide together on 8 June 1942 in their apartment at Siegfriedstrasse 10 because of their imminent deportation.
A few days before her deportation, Charlotte had to submit a declaration of assets on May 30, 1942, which served for the theft of her remaining possessions by the Nazi state. Of her apartment furnishings, she could only specify a bedside table, an armchair and a pillow, but no more clothes. The securities account worth about 250,000 RM, which she still owned at that time, was forfeited to the Reich and was „liquidated“ when Charlotte had already been dead for several months.
For the Nazi state, the case of Charlotte Perutz was thus closed.