page_title: Max Samuel
section_title: Between 1933 and 1938
hierarchical_section_title: Max Samuel / Life / Between 1933 and 1938
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Signet der Firma EMSA-Werke, 1906 bis 1916 in Güstrow, 1916 bis 1941 in Rostock, ab 1939 arisiert, 1938 bis 1960 als EMSA-Works in Blackburn (Eigentümerfamilie Samuel)
context_page_description: Max Samuel was a businessman and self-made man, founder and managing-director of the EMSA-Werke, chair of the Jewish congregation in Rostock and head deputy of the Israelite Upper Council of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.
context_section_description: On 21 February 1933 the Nazi government of the Free State of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, ministry of the interior, in office since 13 July 1932, banned the Mecklenburgische Blätter, a 1928-founded liberal biweekly magazine which Max Samuel helped finance and was edited by his friend Heinrich Greve (1868–1936), after it published an article critical of Hitler's government. Greve's lawyers Gustav Goldstaub (1878–1963) and Rubensohn could do nothing against this despite attempting to defend him. 
  After the Nazis' seizure of power in 1933, during the first weeks after issuing the Reichstag Fire Decree on 28 February, they intimidated their actual and alleged opponents with temporary arrests. Max Samuel's neighbour Rubensohn, who was warned by detective constable Meyer a few weeks after the Nazis came to power that he was in imminent danger because he was a social democrat (that is, a member of the SPD), fled with his son Eli Rubensohn and wife Alice, née Guggenheim, to her family in Basel and wrote a letter to Max Samuel on 18 March 1933. 
  In this letter he explained his flight and made clear his opinion that he had needed to flee due to being a social democrat, not due to being a Jew. He thought that Jews were not in such danger, and Max Samuel agreed in his answer on 21 March: “I think that as long as we live in a lawful state like Germany, which has been built on correctness for centuries and has a claim to culture, hardly anything serious can happen to us.” By the end of March 1933 the police had warned Max Samuel that he would be arrested, so he had to hide for some weeks with his friend Hörsing in Berlin.
  The government-imposed segregation of Jews, even where not provided by new anti-Semitic laws, was often performed with preëmptive obedience, and this excluded Max Samuel from the university booster club and the fraternity of businesspeople. In April 1933 the Rostock tax office presented its demand for back taxes for the years 1927 and 1932, however, accelerating them for immediate execution and thus indicating how fast the treatment of Jewish taxpayers had changed. Therefore the tax office charged a compulsory mortgage on Max Samuel's private villa on Schillerplatz 10.
  At the same time his son-in-law Hermann Kaiser (1904–1992) was deprived of his attorney's certificate at the Berlin Kammergericht due to new anti-Semitic laws and joined the EMSA-Werke as Max Samuel's proxy agent and member of the company's supervisory board. Thus he and his wife Käte moved to Rostock, Alexandrinenstraße 8a. Max limited his societal activity to the Jewish community. As president of the upper council he was concerned with the maintenance and protection of Jewish graveyards in Mecklenburg, where congregations – mostly due to the general rural exodus of Mecklenburgers since the 1870s – had ceased to exist. 
   
  With the ever-increasing anti-Jewish legislation in prewar Nazi Germany, Max Samuel became very active in efforts to help persecuted Jews. The EMSA-Werke's audit report for 1934 reported that Max Samuel had given reichsmarks (ℛℳ) 19,000 in 'loans' which were to be written off, as they were meant to support fleeing Jewish Germans who would likely not be able to repay him.
  Like other foreign-currency earning companies, the EMSA-Werke were obliged to provide the Nazi government with the convertible foreign exchange in return for inconvertible paper reichsmarks (ℛℳ). Due to this regulation, the EMSA-Werke did not see an increase in convertible currency even though export profits were rising. However, since the company could provide foreign exchange, it enjoyed a certain precarious protection from damaging arbitrary government acts. 
  In early 1934, Herbert, who was a graduate with a doctorate in law but – as a Jew – denied a career as a lawyer, had left Germany and was granted immigration to the United Kingdom on the grounds of investing and creating jobs in a poor area. Before emigrating he worked with his father to learn the trades of shoemaking and business. Herbert then founded in 1934 Herbert Foot Appliance Ltd., redistributing EMSA product
caption: EMSA's signet
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