With the project “VerVolkt – May contain traces of Nazis” the city of Memmingen documents the past and present of right-wing extremism in the Allgäu. After almost two years of work on the project, a comprehensive catalog has now been published that presents the results. In the past there were two main exhibitions and other side projects as part of “VerVolkt”. The new book shows how urgently it is necessary to deal with the topic, explains Regina Gropper, curator of the Memmingen City Museum.
Since 2021, Gropper and other participants have been collecting descriptions of previous National Socialist activities and the living conditions of Jews or Sinti and Roma. “It’s shocking what we’ve collected about the Allgäu as part of ‘VerVolkt’,” says Gropper. For example, she refers to right-wing activities in Kempten and Memmingen before and during the Second World War.
Beyond that, however, the project extends to the present. For example, the protests during the pandemic are discussed. The participants in Corona demonstrations often put the Shoah into perspective and mocked the victims “by presenting themselves as persecuted, like the Jews in the Third Reich, and the FRG as a comparable terror regime,” the book says.
Activities of the right-wing extremist scene, such as that of the skinhead camaraderie “Voice of Anger”, are also discussed in the catalogue. The police raided the group last year. According to the Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the group has now spread from Memmingen to other federal states. A leading figure operates a mail order business for “scene articles and recordings”. In the book, this record label is referred to as “the soundtrack to race war and Nazism”.
At the first exhibition, Gropper found out how much people needed to talk about right-wing extremism. According to the curator, the exhibits were the target of anti-Semitic attacks on several occasions. “So much information came together in discussions with visitors that we organized a follow-up exhibition,” she says. “The topic is not over yet. We’ll stay tuned.”
In Kempten, too, the process of coming to terms with the municipality’s right-wing past is far from over. This was recently shown when a street was renamed. Knussertstraße is now called Franz-Sperr-Straße because the Nazi past of its original namesake became public. According to the city administration, Richard Knussert from Kempten was a member of the NSDAP and a senior official during the Nazi era. Franz Sperr, on the other hand, who grew up in Kempten for a while, is considered a resistance fighter against the Nazi regime and was murdered by the National Socialists in 1945.