Adolf “Dolf” Reichenbach

Dolf was born in Halberstadt in 1914. Nineteen days before his twenty-fourth birthday, he wrote from St. Moritz, urging his mother to leave Germany and believe that the family could live again with dignity.

In oral history recorded on 5 August 2026, his daughter Susan Reichenbach Heyman remembered that a non-Jewish friend warned him by telephone, asking whether Dolf was “planning to ski in Switzerland this weekend.” Dolf understood the warning and left that afternoon; the family remembers that authorities came looking for him a day or two later, but neither the friend’s identity nor the exact message has been documented, and no contemporary record of the call or later search has been found.

Ruth and Albert Rothschild were already in the United States before Dolf and Margarete escaped there. A family account recalls that a friend of Albert’s, known only as Max, wrote a letter in support of Dolf’s move.

New York passenger records place Dolf and Margarete together aboard the S.S. Washington in 1937 and the S.S. Paris in 1938. Dolf’s Massachusetts declaration of intention, dated 15 September 1938, records his Halberstadt birth and begins—but does not prove completion of—the naturalization process. His NARA Alien Registration Form, registered in Boston on 6 December 1940, sharpens the trail: it gives 3 Netherlands Road in Brookline, identifies the 4 May 1938 S.S. Paris arrival at New York as his last arrival, preserves a separate first-arrival date of 5 February 1937, names F & M Skirt Co. of Boston at 515 Washington Street as his employer, and lists first citizenship papers no. 277884. Brookline’s 1940 municipal street list independently places “Adolph” and “Margarette” Reichenbach at 3 Netherlands Road, preserving variant spellings in a local civic record. A 1922 Brookline directory transcription gives Arthur F. and Mabel S. Fowler at 3 Netherlands Road, useful only as address history until the underlying scan is checked. The 1922 Boston register and business directory independently lists F & M Skirt Co. at 515 Washington Street, room 519, under skirt manufacturers; Dolf’s employment there still rests on the AR-2. The 1940 census places him in Margarete’s Brookline household.

Susan remembers that Dolf began American life packing boxes at a department store called Raymond’s and worked his way up. His funeral eulogy later records design work at Banner, joining a new life to the trade in which his family had worked for generations. It remembers his love of plants, music, food, travel, bridge, and argument: “He was a maven.”

A public-record summary associates Dolf with Bow Road in Newton and with Brookline and Canton, Massachusetts. The underlying residence records have not yet been identified, so these locations remain possible rather than established addresses.

He married Susan “Subie” Ulmer, raised two children and carried Halberstadt with him. Their son Paul J. Reichenbach transformed the inherited meaning of survival into forty-four years of building Reform Jewish camps, Israel programs and youth education. The descendants’ work in Jewish camping and education, congregational life, support for Israel and Zionism, and the preservation of memory belongs to the family story’s continuity, not merely its epilogue.