Munich: Rotary Club works on the Nazi past – Munich

Thomas Mann bore it with “shock, amusement and amazement”: That’s how he wrote it in his diary in April 1933. He, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, had just been kicked out by the Munich Rotary Club. And his astonishment was directed at the “mental state of these people, who, just now the ‘decoration’ of their union, eject me without a word of regret, of thanks, as if it were a matter of course”.

The club had actually made short work of it. The Munich Rotarians, all prominent representatives of high society, had long basked in the splendor of their “Nobel Rotarians,” as the minutes of a 1930 meeting put it. But Thomas Mann had made himself unpopular with the National Socialists, and now, a good two months after Adolf Hitler took office, the Rotarians threw him out without discussion or a vote. They didn’t even give him a reason. And it didn’t just hit Thomas Mann. The club struck more than a dozen other members from its lists, including even the founding president, because they were Jews or the Nazis considered them to be. One did not want to appear as a “Jewish Grand Lodge”, the club president at the time stated. Seven members then resigned in protest. 33 stayed.

Rotary, founded in 1905, is an international network that brings together the upper class and has written understanding among the people into its statutes. Members like to call each other “friends”. In 1933, of course, some of these friends had become ballast for the other Rotarians, and not only in Munich. The Munich club, however, now, almost nine decades later, apologizes. He has dedicated a book to 14 of his alumni, meant as an attempt at redemption and an apology.

Open detailed view

This book is not about the broad lines: about the fact that the Nazis considered Rotary to be an offshoot of the Freemasons, or that the German clubs bought themselves some time with their behavior. In 1937 they disbanded to forestall a ban. Rather, the focus of the book is on the individual people who were sacked. Today’s Rotarians have searched for traces of them, researched archives and schools, talked to relatives and compiled 14 biographical sketches. Some of those portrayed are prominent, such as the poet Karl Wolfskehl or the art and antiques dealer Otto Bernheimer. Others are largely forgotten.

There is, for example, the lawyer Heinrich Rheinstrom, who distinguished himself early on with scientific publications, taught at the Munich Commercial College at the age of 33 and sat on the board of Munich’s Jewish community. During World War I he celebrated Hindenburg as a national hero. In March 1933 he was in London on business when he found out that the SA had looted his house on Ludwigstrasse in Munich. He then lived in exile in France, later in New York. There is, for example, the antiquarian Emil Hirsch, a great man in his field. His antiquarian bookshops on Karlstrasse, later on Karolinenplatz, were social meeting places. On January 31, 1933, the day after Hitler took office, the man gave a lecture to the Rotarians about the “rarity value of old books”. A little later, the authorities prohibited him from doing business. Worn out, he also emigrated to New York in 1938.

Professionally successful and harassed: The book deals with 14 Munich biographies

The series could be continued: This book tells the story of 14 people from Munich whose biographies are essentially similar: They were highly successful professionally, were harassed and persecuted by the Nazis – and dropped by their supposed friends in the club. To be added would be Anton Betz, once the publisher of Munich Latest Newsthe predecessor sheet of Süddeutsche Zeitung. The Nazis deported him to the Dachau concentration camp as early as March 1933; he was then also expelled from the Rotary Club. It has not found its way into the book.

In contrast to Thomas Mann, in most cases there is no record of how those who were thrown out perceived their expulsion, the break in the Rotarian friendship. Otto Bernheimer, for example, who fled to Venezuela with his family from the Nazis, returned to his native Munich in 1945 and got involved, fought back his company and became president of the Federal Association of the German Art Trade. Michael Stephan, the former head of the Munich City Archives, followed in Bernheimer’s footsteps. In 1957, Bernheimer published an autobiography, “Memories of an Old Munich Man”. The Rotary Club, writes Stephan, he mentioned in it and not a word else.

Karl Huber, Wolfram Göbel (ed.): Remembering and Commemorating. The exclusion of 14 Munich Rotarians in April 1933, Munich: Allitera Verlag 2021, 252 pages, 29.90 euros.