On Wednesday in Munich, hundreds of people commemorated the victims of the pogrom night of 1938 and the subsequent persecution of the Jews, including the Holocaust. For the first time, the reading took place under the motto “Everyone has a name” in the Old Town Hall – where on November 9, 1938 at around 10 p.m. Joseph Goebbels, with a hate speech to NSDAP and SA leaders, the organized attacks on Jewish private individuals, shops and facilities started.
On the evening of the historic date, the official commemoration ceremony took place in the Old Town Hall, at which Charlotte Knobloch, President of the Jewish Community in Munich and Upper Bavaria (IKG), described in a very personal speech how she had experienced the pogrom night as a six-year-old clutching her father’s hand: “I can still hear the glass clinking and the burning wood crackling. I still feel my anger and my incomprehension that a synagogue is on fire before my eyes.” Knobloch warned: “Only history that remains visible remains history.”
“Together and emphatically” it is “about fighting every form of anti-Semitism anew on a daily basis and, in addition to everything else, taking action to ensure that the various and quite changing manifestations of anti-Semitism are clearly recognized and named in order to take consistent action against them.” , explained the second mayor, Kathrin Habenschaden (The Greens), at the commemoration event on behalf of the ill mayor, Dieter Reiter (SPD). She also recalled that the violence on November 9, 1938 in Munich did not trigger any significant protests from the population and that there are currently anti-Semitic incidents again and again.
Keeping history visible: that was what the day was all about. After the names of the victims had been read in the morning, people – among them many students from the municipal Luisengymnasium – walked silently through Munich’s old town to the memorial stone for the former main synagogue on Maxburgstrasse, which had already been opened in June 1938 as one of the first Jewish places of worship in Germany was destroyed by the National Socialists. Stones were laid there to commemorate the murdered, and Rabbi Shmuel A. Brodman sang the prayer for the dead.
This year, the name reading in the Old Town Hall commemorated the patients, nursing staff and doctors from the Munich Jewish Clinic who were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp 80 years ago. The transport of the seriously ill people took place in broad daylight from June 3rd to 5th, 1942 in furniture vans. “Nobody was looking, nobody was asking questions,” wrote an eyewitness. A memorial stone commemorates the hospital founded in 1910 on Hermann-Schmid-Straße in Munich’s Ludwigsvorstadt.
Between June and August 1942, the Nazis deported 1195 Munich residents with a total of 24 transports to Theresienstadt. Most of the deportees perished there or were murdered in extermination camps. Just like Karl Stahl, the then chairman of the Jewish religious community. The highly decorated World War II officer had already been temporarily deported to the Dachau concentration camp after the November pogroms of 1938. In mid-June 1942, Stahl and his wife Luise were deported to Theresienstadt. They survived there until October 1944. After being deported again, the two were killed in the Auschwitz death camp.
There are only four survivors from the hospital of the Israelite religious community
Munich’s police vice president Michael Dibowski recalled Stahl’s life and suffering at the name reading in the old town hall. Other reading contributions came from the Munich cultural advisor Anton Biebl, from the city fire officer Claudius Blank and the students Acelya Abasiz, Tabea Barzen, Charlie Fechter, Ellen Graehl, Leonie Harles, Raquel Jenauth, Ida Kessner, Pauline Schmidt, Marie Sirch and Henry Wagner vom Municipal Luisengymnasium.
An exhibition was set up in the anteroom of the festival hall for the commemoration day, which eight pupils from the Luisengymnasium initiated a year ago. The young people reconstructed the CVs of former Jewish schoolgirls, as far as this was possible from the files of the perpetrators in the city administration. At the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship, 55 Jewish girls attended the school; in November 1938, there were still five who were forcibly deregistered immediately after the November pogrom. They managed to emigrate to safety – unlike many other former schoolgirls who were murdered in the Warsaw ghetto, in the Hartheim killing center or in Kaunas, Lithuania.
Film director Emil Rosenthal (“Kurt Rosen”) was among those who were abducted to Theresienstadt in June 80 years ago and who were remembered in Munich on Wednesday. After the flight abroad failed, the leg-amputee World War I was in the hospital of the Jewish religious community when the clinic was closed. The then chief physician Julius Spanier, one of only four survivors, later described the scene as follows: “During the transport, Hermann-Schmid-Straße was closed to traffic, only a major of the Wehrmacht was allowed to cross the street. When he saw the eerie transport asked the superior about the reason for this strange occurrence. When he had been informed by her truthfully, he cried out in horror and in spite of the surrounding Gestapo and SS in a loud and clearly audible voice: “What? Sick and dying people? I’m ashamed ‘to be a German!'”
In the evening, Sybille Steinbacher explained what awaited the deportees in Theresienstadt in a commemorative lecture in the Old Town Hall. The director of the Fritz Bauer Institute and holder of the chair for the history and effects of the Holocaust at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main explained how the National Socialists created the myth that Theresienstadt was a “preferred camp” and cut the actual everyday life Hard on the other hand: “Everywhere there was urgent tightness. There weren’t beds and mattresses for everyone, even the sick had to lie on the bare concrete floor. The hygienic conditions were miserable. Diseases spread quickly. This was also because hunger was omnipresent. From the No one could live on the food rations they were allotted. Only those who worked received a food allowance.” In fact, it was “a way station on the way to the murder sites”. Of the 39 deportation transports from Munich, 33 went there, with a total of around 1,400 people.
One of the victims: Charlotte Knobloch’s grandmother. “She took the place on the transport so that I didn’t have to do that. I was saved because she sacrificed herself,” said the IKG President. “Even 80 years later, my gratitude for this selflessness is greater than a lifetime. But even greater than the gratitude is the sadness that people like my grandmother were forced to make such an impossible decision in the first place.”