Siegfried Oppenheimer was born on December 30, 1866, in Darmstadt to the Jewish cantor Heinrich Oppenheimer and his wife Emma. After completing his medical studies in 1894, he first moved to Berlin and then to Fürth. There, in 1898, he married Gretchen Offenbacher, the daughter of a factory owner. In 1909, he returned to Darmstadt with his wife and their two children, Elisabeth and Hans, and established an ear, nose, and throat clinic on Kasinostraße. His admission to the “Starkenburg Lodge” of the Jewish B’nai B’rith Order in 1912 reflected the high regard he had come to enjoy within the city’s Jewish community. It is possible that the Hoftheater was already making use of his medical expertise at that time. In any case, Siegfried Oppenheimer was officially listed in the annual theater directories as the volunteer theater physician of the Hessian Landestheater Darmstadt from 1919 onwards.
With the Nazis’ seizure of power and the mass dismissal of staff from the Darmstadt theater, this work came to an end in the spring of 1933. After relocating to his colleague Dr. Max Rosenthal on Artilleriestraße in August of 1933, he left Darmstadt in October of 1934 for Berlin, where his two children were living. From there, Oppenheimer and his wife were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp on August 4, 1942. Neither survived: Siegfried Oppenheimer died on February 19, 1942, Gretchen Oppenheimer on May 13, 1944.
The couple’s children also became victims of Nazi persecution. Elisabeth Oppenheimer, whose husband had already been murdered by the Nazis in 1937, was deported to the Łódź Ghetto on November 1, 1941, together with her 14-year-old son, Heinz. Both died there under circumstances that remain unclear. Hans Oppenheimer, who had been living in Berlin since 1927, likely died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March of 1945.
1866 Darmstadt
1942 Theresienstadt (Concentration Camp)