the history of Jakobstraße 2/3

Jakobstr. 2, built in 1909/10 by construction master Franz Grunert on behalf of Leopold Cohn.
Jakobstr. 3, built in 1868 as a residential house by the clock manufacturer August Eduard Röhrig, in 1896 the factory is built in the backyard by Leopold Cohn, who had bought the residential house in 1895 and had it rebuilt.

The factory in the backyard of the residential and commercial buildings at Jakobstraße 2/3 once belonged to Leopold Cohn, who arranged for the new factory building to be constructed.
Jakobstraße was the location of the "Louis Cohn Stocking Factory", which was involved in the production of knitted stockings, socks and sports socks that were sent all over the world. This existed since 1846, founded by Louis Cohn. The son, Leopold Cohn, joined the business in 1857. The first building was then at Marienplatz 2. Later they moved to Jakobstrasse, the land and residential building were acquired in 1895, and in 1896 the factory was built in the backyard of Jakobstrasse 3. The storage and office rooms there remained in use when the actual production was moved to a modern factory building on Jauernicker Strasse in the southern part of Görlitz in 1923. Several thousand dozens of pairs of stockings and socks left the factory rooms and production facilities of the Louis Cohn Strumpfwarenfabrik AG every week, and if one adds up the production of a whole year, several million pairs of stockings made their way from Görlitz to the wholesale trade and to the largest retailers. Fritz and Ludwig Cohn, the sons of Leopold Cohn, are responsible for the management. Ludwig Cohn, born in 1875, died in Buchenwald in 1938 as a result of the prison conditions. In December 1938, the property and factory of the Jewish Cohn family was forcibly nationalised, and the party authorities appointed a new managing director. With the forced sale of the entire assets of the former Cohn hosiery factory, the Cohn family was forced to sell the factory. Cohn hosiery factory by the then owners and successors, the Jewish merchant Rudolf Milchner and Alfred Feldmann. The Cohn, Feldmann and Milchner families fled Görlitz and managed to escape persecution. Today, descendants of the families of Fritz and Ludwig Cohn live in Israel, Brazil and the USA.
In addition to Jewish houses on Steinstrasse and Viktoriastrasse, another Jewish house was established at Jakobstrasse 3 in 1939. In the language of the authorities of the Nazi state, Judenhaus was the term used to describe residential buildings formerly owned by Jews, into which only Jewish tenants and subtenants were forcibly moved. Stumbling stones commemorating the family of Dr. Erich Oppenheimer, his wife and their son Werner were laid in July 2007 in front of the house at no. 3 Jakobstraße.

From Jakobstraße, the path of the Oppenheimer family and other Jewish families led to the labour camp in Tormersdorf in 1942, where the couple committed suicide knowing that deportation was imminent. The son Werner died in the concentration camp in Lublin in 1942.
In the post-war period, the company founded by Louis Cohn became nationally owned and traded under the name VEB Görlitzer Strumpfwarenfabrik, later under the name VEB Kinderstrickwaren Ebersbach.
The factory building on Jakobstraße was used as Factory 2 of the VEB Feuerlöschgerätewerk until the end of the GDR era. Part of the factory building in the backyard on Jakobstraße was demolished a few years ago.

Text: Daniel Breutmann, goerlitz21 e.V. / Network Industrial Culture Görlitz