Retail sale of footwear by N. Blau, owner Julius Adler

The Blau/Adler family Nathan Blau from Thüringen (born 1845) married Bertha Baruch in 1873 and a year later bought a house in Neue Strasse (now no. 80) in Bremervürde. There he traded in furs and animal skins and later founded a shoe shop. The couple had two daughters (Hulda and Henriette) and two sons, Max (Martin) and Bernhard. Martin died early. Two years after Nathan Blau's death (1902), his daughter Hulda married Julius Adler and continued the business with him. In 1909 Julius acquired the civil right. During the First World War, Julius Adler took part in the Balkan campaign and Bernhard Blau also had to go to war, for which he was later awarded the Iron Cross. At the beginning of the 1920s, anti-Jewish tendencies became apparent, so that Hulda and Julius' son, Albert Adler, got into trouble with his anti-Semitic principal. After graduating from high school in Geestemünde, he completed a banking apprenticeship there and then learned the shoe wholesale trade in Berlin. Around 1925 he represented „Salamander Schuhe“ in Bremervörde. In 1933, he married a Christian woman in Berlin. Bertha Blau died a year later and was the last to be buried in the Jewish burial ground on the Höhne. Despite economic and social restrictions during National Socialism, Julius and Hulda Adler's shoe shop survived until the final ban on all Jewish businesses after the Reich Pogrom Night on November 9/10, 1938, when their shop window was also vandalized. After that, Hulda had to deal with all the problems of dissolving the business on her own until her husband Julius returned after a stay in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and was subsequently conscripted into forced labor in the port of Bremervölde. At the end of January 1939, Julius Adler de-registered in Bremerville and traveled to New York. Hulda sold the property in 1939, moved in with her sister in Hanover until her husband could raise the money for the guarantee, and also traveled to New York in 1940. Her husband died there in 1943.