Philipp Joseph Stern – last owner of the banking house

Philipp Joseph Stern was born 1876 in Cologne. He married Bertha Emilie Rosa Bröckl (b. 1889), daughter of a Protestant Frankfurt family. Until the birth of their son August Ludwig Eduard Stern in 1926, they lived in the Drususgasse 3; some two years later they moved to the affluent Cologne district of Marienburg.
Along with August Samuelsdorff, Philipp Stern directed his father’s banking business until the “Aryanization” of September 1938. His son later described Philipp as a Koelsche Jung (true Cologne boy) well networked in the city.

Although his wife was a Protestant, Philipp Stern was threatened in 1944 with deportation to the Theresienstadt ghetto (today Terezin in the Czech Republic). This he avoided by suicide. His body was retrieved from the Rhine near Cologne on March 23, 1944. Philipp Stern was buried in the Cemetery of the Orthodox Jewish Congregation Adass Jeshurun in Cologne’s Deckstein district.

August Stern was sent in 1938 to boarding school in Geneva. He last saw his father that summer; only after the war was he able to return to his mother. In 1951 he emigrated to the USA, where he was from then on known as Gus Stern.