Stop 5: Dr. Paul Berkenau
„Dreieck“ (Südwall 36) – go to map – go to starting point
Protestant neurologist Dr. Paul Berkenau came from the Jewish Benjamin family of Hannover. In 1911, aged 21, he assumed the surname Berkenau. When he came to Solingen at the end of 1927, he set up his first medical practice at Weststraße (address today: Klemens-Horn-Straße 25). The Berkenau family made friends with their direct neighbours, married doctors Hans and Erna Rüppel. In 1929 already, Paul Berkenau moved to Südwall 36 (location today: around the triangular junction called “Dreieck” at Graf-Wilhelm-Platz), together with his family: his wife Erika, née Scharfenberg, who was 12 years younger than him, and their two children Günther and Susanne who had been born in 1924 and 1927, respectively. Later on, Günther actively participated in the YMCA. According to Änne Wagner, cultural critic Max Leven, who suffered from tabes dorsalis, and herself were patients of Dr. Berkenau.
Günther was first in the Berkenau family to emigrate. As a consequence of personal harassment, Dr. Berkenau deregistered his son from the local grammar school as early as 1937 and enabled him to attend a boarding school in England where, at first, he encountered massive problems due to his lacking command of the English language. When Mr. and Mrs. Berkenau officially moved to Cologne on 29 September 1938, they temporarily left their 11-year-old daughter Susanne to stay with the Rüppel family in Solingen. However, following the “Kristallnacht“ in the night of 9–10 November 1938, the house of Hans and Erna Rüppel was under threat and Dr. Berkenau arranged for an “Aryan” doctor to take his daughter in.
Out of necessity, the popular philanthropic doctor had to emigrate to England in 1939. He had to resit the English doctoral examination before he was allowed to start working as a clinician in 1941.
After various changes of school, his son Günther eventually attended a day school in Oxford to where his parents had fled, via Switzerland, in the meantime. After being employed as a forestry worker for some time, he signed up for the British army in 1942, aged 18, and was trained as a tank driver there. At that point, Günther changed his family name to Berkeley. He was on duty when the Western Allies landed on the coast of Normandy in northern France on 6 June 1944 (D-Day) and thereby opened the Western front at which he fought until 8 May 1945. After the war had ended, he was soldier of the occupying army in northern Germany.
His father Dr. Paul Berkenau obtained British citizenship as late as 1947. He retired in 1957 and died six years later, in 1963.