Memories of the Parkhotel: Bad Tölz and the Jewish hotelier – Bavaria

Bad Tölz is often described as a cozy town at the foot of the Alps, with a mountain panorama, the Isar, traditional costumes and town houses. This is probably how it was described in an article published more than 30 years ago in the New York Times appeared. Alfred Gutmann thought it was an overly smooth picture. The 69-year-old, who spent part of his childhood in Bad Tölz, sat down in November 1992 and wrote a letter to the renowned newspaper, explaining that the city was “one of the first targets of Hitler’s ethnic cleansing.” Bad Tölz – it was also a home of the NSDAP and the SS. And a victim of the Nazi terror was his uncle: the hotelier Julius Hellmann.

The Jewish businessman built the multi-story Park Hotel on Buchener Strasse in the spa district in 1913 – on the spot where the “Haus am Park” retirement home now stands. Many things in the sophisticated house were very modern. Elegant interior, double rooms with cold and hot water – which was not a given in those days -, breakfast terrace, ballroom, elevator, a kitchen with special dishes for gout and diabetes sufferers, a hotel car that took guests to and from the train station at all times . “The business meets the most pampered demands,” stated the city chronicler at the time, Baron Franz von Lobkowicz.

The Park Hotel had another special feature: it was tailored to the needs of Jewish visitors. A mezuzah was attached to each door frame – a tube containing a saying from the Torah on paper. The house, writes Lobkowicz, “surpasses all other facilities of the same type in the bathing part.” And apparently it went well. According to statistics from 1918, 980 guests stayed in Tölz on July 7th, 102 of whom were of the “Israeli faith”. Eight years later, Hellmann even managed to hire the composer Peter Kreuder as artistic director for his hotel.

The Tölz journalist and author Christoph Schnitzer researched all of this from the ground up in meticulous work. In his first book from 1995, which deals with the Nazi period in Bad Tölz, he still believed that Julius Hellmann had died on May 8, 1945 – and had committed suicide. That’s what it said in the restitution files of the Munich I Regional Court from 1952, and that’s what credible contemporary witnesses from Tölz reported. At that time, Schnitzer said, he “assumed that the Hellmanns, as owners of the Tölzer Parkhotel, were not direct victims of Nazi rule.”

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They were. This was shown by Alfred Gutmann’s letter to the editor, which Schnitzer received almost three decades later from a friend in the USA and which touched him deeply. Julius Hellmann did not end his own life on the day the war ended. He had already been murdered in the Chelmno extermination camp in 1942. In addition to him, his eldest brother Max and his older sister Bertha were also killed in the Holocaust. Other family members managed to escape.

The Hellmanns come from Marktbreit in Lower Franconia. Abraham Hellmann and his wife Regina ran a matzo bakery there that baked unleavened bread for Passover and supplied it to the entire Jewish population in northern Bavaria. They had nine children. Her son Max took over the business after her death; Julius was one of the younger siblings. The future hotelier remained unmarried and not much personal information is known about him. In Munich he ran the Café Hungaria on Fürstenstrasse for a short time – without success. He came to Bad Tölz with a lot of debt, where, at the age of 28, he fulfilled his dream: he built the Park Hotel. The business was doing well economically; in 1920 he even leased the Kurpension Hindenburg (Villa Berndi) and ran it as an “Israelite restaurant”.

Fake news about Jewish guests in Tölz appeared as early as 1918

However, the threatening clouds of anti-Semitism and National Socialism gathered over Tölz early on. In 1918, a report appeared in two Bavarian newspapers that 583 of 600 guests in the spa town were Jewish. In reality it was only around ten percent. A Tölzer remarked on the sidelines of a newspaper article with this fake news: “Ugh devil! Cause of war and extension: capital of the Jews and the lodge brothers. Poor Bavaria!”

Four years later, the Tölzer Gendarmerie reported that on August 15, 1922, around 20 NSDAP supporters marched through the bathing area, singing “patriotic songs” and singing the anti-Semitic Erhardslied: “Kick the Jews out!” That’s what they bawled as they walked past the Park Hotel. According to the report, something unusual then happened: “A number of gentlemen ran out of the Park Hotel after the troops, hit the demonstrators with sticks and a gentleman with pince-nez insulted them: rascals!” That was – mind you – in 1922, explains Schnitzer. There was already a NSDAP local group in Bad Tölz back then, one of the earliest ever.

“Quite a bit of haggling over the hotel under the direction of the town hall”

It got worse. In 1934, during his first attempts to sell the hotel, Julius Hellmann begged the mayor of Tölz, Anton Stollreither, in a letter “not to put him in the position that he and his siblings, some of whom had been in the hotel with him for over 22 years “work without any remuneration, without having to deduct a penny”. After that, according to Schnitzer, there was “quite a bit of haggling over the hotel under the direction of the town hall.” However, the offers of a good 300,000 Reichsmarks were clearly too low. In May 1934, the city council unanimously approved a proposal from the spa association “that it would be urgently desirable in the interests of the entire bathing establishment if the Jewish-owned Parkhotel, which is the Jewish hotel in Bad Tölz, were to pass into Aryan hands.”

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But things got even worse. In a letter to Bavarian Economics Minister Hermann Esser, porter Max Burghardt and the hotel’s staff praised the social feeling that Julius Hellmann had for each of his employees. “He sees him not just as a tool, but as an employee,” it says. The answer came not from Esser, but from NSDAP district leader Edward Bucherer: “Anyone who still thinks it’s right to support Jews these days shouldn’t be surprised if they lose the sympathy of the rest of their people.” The café of the same name at Walchensee, which Bucherer ran, was visited by Adolf Hitler in 1936. After the end of the war, the former district leader was considered less burdened by denazification because he was “tolerant and fair” towards those who were politically persecuted.

After the sale of the Park Hotel was not successful due to the mortgages, the district office ordered its closure in August 1935. According to Schnitzer, this was justified “cynically by the raids and excesses of the SA and SS against Julius Hellmann and his Jewish guests”, which were ultimately “supported by the will of the population”. The hotelier was forced to rent his hotel to the Madlener couple from the neighboring Haus Isarwinkel. However, without Jewish guests, the Park Hotel was unprofitable. In 1937 Anton and Louise Reinhard purchased the property for 350,000 Reichsmarks. After deducting taxes and duties, the Jewish owner was left with less than ten percent of the loan. While the Reinhards sold the house to the NSDAP a year later for a profit, Julius Hellmann moved to Hamburg.

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And then the worst happened. The hotelier as well as Max and Bertha Hellmann were deported to the Lodz ghetto in 1941, from there taken to Chelmno in 1942 and murdered. His sister Mathilde died of heart failure in the Jewish hospital in Frankfurt in 1942. His brother Bernhard managed to escape by ship via Japan to the USA. His sister Paula also escaped to the USA with her children Alfred and Bernd. His brother Moritz, who did not work in Bad Tölz, was killed with his wife Rahel and their daughters Julie and Regina in the Sobibor extermination camp; only their son Norbert survived and fled to the United States.

“The pain for the beloved siblings will last forever.”

And the Park Hotel? After the war it was first used as a military hospital and then used by the US armed forces. In 1960, the Jörg couple from Landau bought the house. In 1971, the former, now run-down hotel suddenly burst into flames and the police spoke of arson. It was demolished in the same year. And the Hellmanns? Julius Hellmann’s heirs were awarded the purchase price by decision of the regional court in 1952, but in the end they saw little of it. A year before her death, Paula Gutmann, the daughter of the Jewish hotelier, wrote about the demolition of the hotel: “Here they say: Forget about it! I also want to forget and not mourn the house, after all they are just stones, but the pain is gone the beloved siblings will remain forever.”

However, the story of the Hellmanns should not be forgotten in Bad Tölz. In a lecture he recently gave at the Historical Association in the Tölz City Museum, Schnitzer announced that three so-called memorial stones in front of the museum on Marktstrasse would commemorate Julius, Bertha and Max Hellmann. Hanna Sherak, granddaughter of Paula Gutmann, and Johnny Hellmann, son of Norbert Hellmann, supported this form of remembrance. According to Schnitzer, Hannah Sherak responded: “A significant improvement over most memorials is that they specifically focus on the victims and their absence.”