Ludwig Heine was born on January 15, 1876 in Berlin as the son of the merchant Max Heine and his wife Emilie, née Jacobson. The family was of Jewish faith.

Education and place of work

Ludwig Heine passed high school leaving with examination [Reifezeugnis] in 1894 at the Royal Wilhelms-Gymnasium Berlin on Bellevue Street in what is now the Tiergarten district. He then studied medicine in Munich, Berlin and Freiburg. In 1899 he passed the medical state examination. In the same year he received his medical doctorate at University of Freiburg / Breisgau with his thesis “Multiple stomach ulcers in tuberculosis” and was granted his medical license. Heine worked on his thesis [Dissertation] under the Freiburg pathologists Ernst Ziegler and Clemens von Kahden.

His studies were followed by a year of voluntary military service and a job as an assistant doctor at Berlin municipal hospitals. He was temporarily an intern and later an employee at Hugo Neumann’s Berlin “Kinderhaus”, a polyclinic for poor children founded in 1887, which had been located on Blumenstrasse in Berlin since 1897. The polyclinic was an early specialized care center with various departments at a time when there were hardly any treatment facilities for children (see G. Kirchner, Dr. Hugo Neumann, A Pioneer of Social Pediatrics). Heine initially worked as a general practitioner since 1906. Since 1912 he ran his own pediatric practice for over 24 years at Brandenburgische Strasse 21 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. In the 1914 Reich Medical Calendar, Heine is listed as a specialist in internal medicine and pediatrics.

In 1909 he married Minna Simson, born in 1879, who came from the Gerson and Jeanette Simson family of factory owners in Suhl, Thuringia. Gerson Simson was co-owner of the “Simson Werke Suhl” [the company “Simson & Co”, founded in 1856, quickly developed into the important “Simson Werke”, which was expropriated without compensation in 1933/34, “aryanized” and placed under the control of the NSDAP. Following 1945, the factory continued in the German Democratic Republic [GDR] under a different company name, and a small part of the factory was called “Motorrad Simson GmbH” until 2002].

Ludwig and Minna Heine’s son Max Ludwig was born on November 2, 1910 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, and their daughter Ilse Irene Heine was born on February 12, 1918.

Ludwig Heine took an active part in the First World War as a staff doctor from August 1914 to November 1918.

1933

Following January 1933 at the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship, the family’s living situation changed fundamentally. The family was exposed to the anti-Jewish measures of the National Socialists. On April 1, 1933, Ludwig Heine experienced the boycott of Jewish medical practices and Jewish businesses.

His daughter Ilse Heine suffered from anti-Semitic hostility at school. His son Max Ludwig Heine was unable to continue his law studies and decided to flee. At the age of 23, he left Germany at the end of 1933 and arrived at New York via Cherbourg in France with his wife Lotte on January 9, 1934. The Heines and their daughter first traveled to the USA in August/September 1935 with transit visa from Hamburg on the S.S. St. Louis and after their return to Germany they prepared their final escape to the USA.

The 18-year-old daughter Ilse Irene Heine arrived in New York on April 2, 1936, via Hamburg on the S.S. Washington. Her father had accompanied her from Berlin to Hamburg. Ilse Heine began studying at Swarthmore College not far from Philadelphia. In 1940 she married Frederick Siegfried Baum, who was from Frankfurt. Ludwig and Minna Heine left Berlin in the summer of 1936. From Le Havre they arrived in New York on the S.S. Manhattan on June 11, 1936. They found accommodation in Richmond Hill, Queens, New York. 59-year-old Ludwig Heine initially had no income. He had to take language exams and the American state exam in the USA. In 1937, at the age of 60, he found a job as a pediatrician in the New York City School Board. He later became the chief school doctor there [Chief of Pediatrics for the New York City School System]. He no longer tried to set up a private practice.

Ludwig Heine died at the age of 84 on August 3, 1960 as a result of a stroke. His grave is in the Mount Hope Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson / Greenburgh, Westchester County, New York. His wife Minna Heine-Simson died in September 1975. Their son Max Ludwig Heine, born in 1910, died in 1988. Their daughter Ilse Heine-Baum died in March 2010 in New York. Their graves are in the same cemetery where their parents found their final resting place.

Ludwig Heine’s sister, Alice Heine-Bennigson, born in 1879 and living in Berlin, was deported from Berlin to the Theresienstadt / Terezin ghetto together with her daughter Ursula Bennigson on June 30, 1943. Alice Bennigson was deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz in the so-called autumn transports on October 23, 1944 and murdered there upon arrival. Heine’s niece, 26-year-old Ursula Bennigson, died in September 1943 under ghetto conditions in Theresienstadt.