Friedrich Kahn was born in Bischofsheim on October 1, 1907, as son of Hartwig and Therese Kahn. His younger sister was Bina Kahn. 

After leaving school with his high school diploma, Friedrich, also known as Fritz, studied law in Frankfurt, Berlin and Giessen, where he graduated in 1931 with a doctorate and an overall grade of "cum laude". Due to the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service", the so-called "Aryan Paragraph", he was not accepted into the Hessian judicial service.

In 1935, he fled the National Socialist terror via Bulgaria to Amsterdam, where he lived underground from July 1942 to May 1945. In 1946, he began working as a merchant.

On June 2, 1948, he married Hilda Cohen, born in Bocholt in 1899, who had survived deportation and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and returned to Amsterdam in 1945. Dr. Friedrich Kahn died in 1988 at the age of 81. 

His wife brought children into the family from her first marriage. Their granddaughters Anita Roshar and Ellen Monica are still alive today, each with three children.

Together with his sister Bina Lambert, Dr. Friedrich Kahn sought "compensation" or "restitution" in the legal sense after the Holocaust - a laborious and lengthy undertaking. After both had named themselves as heirs of Hartwig and Theresa Kahn in 1947, the Groß-Gerau district court issued them a joint certificate of inheritance in 1949. On the basis of the "Federal Law on Compensation for Victims of National Socialist Persecution (BEG, 1953)", a Cologne law firm took over their representation in March 1954.

The first phase with various applications for compensation ended in April 1957 with a settlement: the state of Hesse paid DM 6.450 "for 43 full months" to both heirs. This means that the state paid DM 75.00 per person per month for 43 months of flight and expulsion. Furthermore, in August 1958 the siblings were awarded compensation for "damage to their professional advancement" and in May 1960 several thousand DM were paid out "for the seizure of household effects, furnishings and precious metal objects". A late compensation for robbery and vandalism during the November pogrom of 1938.

(Helmut Helm)