Melitta and Max Wallach once provided the people of Munich with fabrics and fashion – then they were expropriated, deported and murdered in Auschwitz. Why the official commemoration of this and many other fates is so important.
He was a household name, worldwide – the costume outfitter Wallach in Munich’s Residenzstrasse. For more than a hundred years, the once royal Bavarian purveyor to the court provided Oktoberfest visitors and traditionalists with fabrics and fashion. A success-story. But also, as in so many places in Germany, a story with a terrible, a murderous caesura. A commemorative plaque has been commemorating this since Thursday evening. To Melitta and Max Wallach, who were expropriated by the Nazis in 1938, deported from Münster to the Theresienstadt ghetto on July 21, 1942, and on October 28, 1944 to the Auschwitz extermination camp, where the SS murdered them.