Dinkelsbühl
Outside
the town where, every summer, Dinkelsbühl celebrates its surrender to
Swedish Troops in 1632 during the Thirty Years' War through a townwide
reenactment played out by many of the town's residents. It features an
array of Swedish troops attacking the city gate and children dressed in
traditional garb coming to witness the event. Paper cones full of
chocolate and candy are given as gifts to children. This historical
event is called the "Kinderzeche" and can in some aspects be compared
with the "Meistertrunk" in Rothenburg. The name is derived from the two
German words for "child" and "the bill for food and drink in an inn",
and is called such because of the legend that a child saved the town
from massacre by the Swedish Troops during the surrender. The legend
tells that when the Swedish army besieged the town, a teenage girl took
the children to the Swedish general to beg for mercy. The Swedish
general had recently lost his young son to illness, and a boy who
approached him so closely resembled his own son that he decided to spare
the town.
Hitler's supposed painting of Dr.-Martin-Luther-Straße (signed bottom right). On the right is the Mühlgraben from a Nazi-era postcard and today.
In 1645 a Protestant midwife was executed after forced to become a Catholic. She was sentenced by a Catholic Inner Council and executed with the sword and then burned.
In
1655 and 1656 a major series of trials involving eight accused women
took place during which a woman was burned alive, seven women were
beheaded and then burned, a woman was beheaded, and a man was beheaded
and burned. It began after a woman was accused and arrested by her
husband of attempted poisoning. Under torture, she accused her mother,
her sister and other women of witchcraft. Of the women arrested, five
were executed by the sword and Margaretha Buckel died during her
imprisonment. Susanna Stadtmüller and Walburga Mangoldt were banned from
the city, and their relatives had to pay the court costs and a fine.In
1658 Sebastian Zierer was accused by a neighbour and his son-in-law of
causing paralysis and pain. Under torture, he confessed to poisoning
many people with powder. He was sentenced to death by beheading and
subsequently burned for witchcraft. In 1660 Barbara Huckler was accused
of causing the suicide of her daughter-in-law. She was arrested and
interrogated for witchcraft. Under torture, she admitted she had
poisoned people with "Drudenpulver". She was also beheaded and burned.
In fact, between 1649 and 1709 forty other cases of witch trials were
held, none of which ended up leading to any executions. Many were
punished with banishment, imprisonment, the so-called fool's house (Narrenhaus) or the throat violin (Halsgeige) and forced to apologise. 
Looking the other way from the marktplatz towards the Hotel Goldene Rose and Protestant Church, wife and son taking a tour from the back of a horse-drawn carriage from an earlier visit.
Looking down Dr. Martin-Luther-Straße.
The
Jewish community in Dinkelsbühl dates from the 13th century, often
suffering expulsion or persecution. Indeed, the earliest references to Jewish life in Dinkelsbühl are related to such events. Entries in the so-called Memorbüchern- manuscripts in which the Jewish communities commemorate the victims of earlier persecution- suggest that Dinkelsbühl Jews were involved in the pogroms of 1298 and 1348-49. By the time Dinkelsbühl was incorporated into the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1806, there were no Jews living there. The most recent Jewish community
existed here from 1853 to the November pogroms in 1938, after which the
nineteen remaining men and women fled. More than 25 Jews were victims of
the Holocaust. The town's stolperstein were set up in 2009 in front of
their former houses as well as a memorial plaque at Haus Klostergasse 5
where the prayer room synagogue had been located. This had originally been the house that merchant Seligmann Hamburger bought in 1862 within which were the synagogue and mikveh rooms. His son Adolf took over the house and acted from 1932 to 1938 as the first and last chairman of the independent cultural community Dinkelsbühl. He and his wife were murdered in the Holocaust; three stumbling blocks are in front of the house entrance. In December 2013,
Barack Obama presided at the White House over the Hanukka Reception of
the Dinkelsbühler Jews. The occasion was the use of a special Hanukkah
chandelier created by Manfred Ansbacher, born in 1922 in the town.
Ansbacher, who renamed himself Anson after moving to the United States,
had produced a candlestick, in which the candles stand on pure freedom
statues. The American President was told
that as a teenager, Anson had experienced "the horror of Kristallnacht"
and lost a brother (Heinz) in the Holocaust. Anson sought "a place where
he could live his life free of fear and practice his religion. For
Manfred and for millions of others, America became such a place." His brother Heinz, murdered in 1942 at the age of 16, is commemorated by the stolperstein at the entrance to their former house at Altrathausplatz 11.
The tower of St. George's Church shown in the background.
Gunzenhausen
Gunzenhausen's
Blasturm on Brunnengässchen between the wars and today. In 1933
Gunzenhausen had a total population of 5,686 of whom 184 were Jewish.
The area around had been an economically weak agricultural region
comprised mostly of small farms, a predominantly Protestant population
and a relatively high proportion of Jews in many places. Hitler himself
had delivered a campaign speech in Gunzenhausen on October 13, 1932. The
Nazis had achieved above-average results in elections, so that by 1930
they had already won a remarkable 35% of the vote (compared to just
under 19 percent in the country); in 1932 66%, nearly double the
national average; and on March 6, 1933 the Nazis received 67.5% compared
to the Reich average of 43.9% of the votes. As Loomis and Beegle (727)
wrote a year after the end of the war in the American Sociological
Review,
Relatively low land values, middle-sized family farms, and marginal agriculture characterize the one rural area in Bavaria wherean exceptionally large proportion of the vote was cast for the Nazi party in July, 1932. This area, a Protestant section including Franconia to the west of Nuernberg, contains the Kreise Uffenheim (81 per cent Nazi), Rothenburg (83 per cent Nazi), Neustadt (79 per cent Nazi), Ansbach (76 per cent Nazi), Dinkelsbuhl (71 per cent Nazi), and Gunzenhausen (72 per cent Nazi). The Nazis received no such large votes in the Catholic areas of Bavaria in 1932.
It was for this reason that the Völkische Beobachter described Gunzenhausen as the "best district".
At
the Bismarck memorial on the Burgstall not far from the market square,
erected in 1901. Nearby at the site the first memorial honouring Hitler
was erected in April 1933. At the same time several SA flags were
consecrated in the Protestant town church as the dean delivered the
sermon. A huge crowd also gathered in the market square to watch the
christening of two gliders that were to be rechristened "Adolf Hitler"
and "Dr. Münch". The
monument was destroyed by the Americans in 1946. Hitler himself did not
want any public monuments with his own person. The corresponding decree
of December 1933, which had been published in several German
newspapers, read: “The Reich Chancellor has ordered that no Hitler
memorials, memorial halls or the like may be erected or attached to his
memory during his lifetime. Although
popularly known as the “Hitler Monument”, the monument was dedicated to
the “national uprising”. It too had the shape of an obelisk with a
swastika and inscription and made an explicit parallel between the
"national uprising" of 1933 and the throwing back of the Romans over the
Danube 1,700 years earlier, hence its situation alongside the Roman
limes. In fact, this site marked the northernmost point on the Rhaetian Limes
where a Roman military camp was established. East of this camp the
Roman border wall rises over the ridge of the "Vorderen Schloßbuck", at
the highest point of which the Bismarck monument was erected for which
stones from the Rhaetian Wall were also used. Next to the monument is
this Roman watchtower with how it would have appeared at the time:
The christening of two aircraft in the names of Adolf Hitler and Dr. Münch on the market square in Altmühlstadt, by then renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz. Gunzenhausen and its surroundings stood out in the discrimination of its Jewish population. Anti-Semitic incidents have increased since the local Nazi group was founded in 1922. The Jewish cemetery was desecrated and the synagogue windows smashed. In 1928 and 1929 there was a wave of anti-Semitic agitation, which also led to attacks on Jewish merchants. The Jewish community tried - with little success - to take action against the attacks. In 1932 Heinrich Münch, who was elected mayor for ten years, joined the Nazi Party and the SA and was a radical anti-Semite. When Hitler came to power in late January 1933, the Jews were exposed to Nazi violence. One of the persecutors of the Jews was the tax officer Johann Appler, who had joined the Nazis in 1928. In 1929 he became local chairman and in 1930 district leader of the Nazi Party. In 1931 Appler founded a local group of the ϟϟ. Appler was appointed deputy mayor on April 27, 1933 at the suggestion of the powerful city council and highest SA leader in Gunzenhausen, SA-Sturmbannführer Karl Bär, the third most important Nazi in Gunzenhausen. Bär was an old fighter and worked as a tax secretary in the financial administration. From 1929 he sat on the city council of Gunzenhausen; before that in 1926 he had joined the ϟϟ and was the main director of SA terror. Before 1933, several criminal proceedings had been pending against Bär in connection with his SA activities but a "local action committee to ward off Jewish lies and atrocity propaganda" under the leadership of Appler took over the anti-Semitic agitation. Arbitrary arrests, boycott of Jewish shops, public denunciation, medical treatment bans were only part of the measures.
 |
| Hitlerplatz then and now |
On April 1, 1933, the nationwide boycott of Jewish shops in Germany and Gunzenhausen took place. The non-Jewish population was put under pressure not to buy in Jewish shops, not to be treated by a Jewish doctor and, for example, not to go to the restaurant of “Simon Strauss”. The innkeeper and his son were mistreated by the SA as early as 1933. On June 6 1933, around an hundred Nazis gathered in front of Jewish houses and shops and demanded that Jews living in the village be taken into protective custody. The police dispersed the crowd, but put three Jewish residents in jail. In 1934, Mayor Münch wrote to Goebbels that "[a] large part of economic life ... is in Jewish hands ... Politically, Jews have always been democrats."
Gauleiter
Julius Streicher visiting the Diakonissenhaus Hensoltshöhe, a
Protestant charity and a spiritual centre founded in 1909, on October
14, 1934. The
Hensoltshöhe Deaconess Motherhouse sought a close relationship to the regime, and particularly with
Julius Streicher, who determined
many things in Gunzenhausen's politics. Below are images of the centre during this time and today.
In
March 1934, SA men beat a Jewish citizen to hospital who had complained
to Mayor Münch about attacks by the SA on life and property. On Palm
Sunday, March 25, 1934, the 22-year-old SA Obersturmführer Kurt Bähr,
the nephew of the SA-Sturmbannführer and SA boss of Gunzenhausen Karl
Bähr, in the morning sought a dispute with the owner of the clothing store Sigmund Rosenfelder, so that he feared the worse. In the late
afternoon, Kurt Bähr and his SA men attacked Simon Strauss's inn. First
they beat the German national mayor of Gundelsheim, Leopold Baumgärtner,
from Simon Strauss's inn, because "he drank his beer at the Jew's".
Then they attacked the innkeeper Simon Strauss and his son Julius,
seriously injuring the son. Thereupon
Bär gave an anti-Jewish inflammatory speech in front of the inn where a
crowd of around 15–20 SA men had gathered. Initially the innkeeper
family was brought to the city prison "for protection." The
unconscious Julius Strauss was carried and dropped several times by the
SA men and kicked. His mother was slapped several times in the face by
Kurt Bär leading the crowd to exclaim “hit it!” In larger and smaller
groups of mostly fifty to several hundred people, the crowd, led by Bär
and his people, marched through the old town in front of the Jewish
property until 23.00 shouting “Jews must get out” as they forcibly
entered houses and apartments. 29
Jewish men and six women were accompanied to prison under abuse, some
in nightgowns. The number of those involved in the acts of violence is
given as 750 to 1500 people. 
The
secret organiser of the pogrom, Obersturmbannführer Karl Bär,
eventually arrived at the gaol, releasing the women but detaining the
men until the next evening. The attacks were reported in the press
around the world such as The New York Times, Manchester Guardian and the Neue Wiener Journal with the number of those involved in the acts of violence is given as 750 to 1500 people.
Two men were killed in the acts of violence which David Irving in Goebbels (328) unsurprisingly disputes:
The
secret organiser of the pogrom, Obersturmbannführer Karl Bär,
eventually arrived at the gaol, releasing the women but detaining the
men until the next evening. The attacks were reported in the press
around the world such as The New York Times, Manchester Guardian and the Neue Wiener Journal with the number of those involved in the acts of violence is given as 750 to 1500 people. Two men were killed in the acts of violence which David Irving in Goebbels (328) unsurprisingly disputes:
Operating primarily from the safety of Prague, the emigrés around Bernhard (‘Isidor’) Weiss orchestrated a raucous outcry about alleged Nazi atrocities: they claimed that two Jews had died in a pogrom at Gunzenhausen, and that the former social democrat deputy Heilmann was being maltreated in concentration camp. The stories were fictional, but fact would inevitably follow fiction.
As always with Irving, the reality is easily uncovered; the
two Jewish residents who died were 65-year-old Max
Rosenau who had stabbed himself out of fear of the mob
breaking into his house, and 30-year-old businessman Jakob Rosenfelder, a
Social Democrat who was
found hanged in a shed. In fact, this prompted the Nazis to open court
proceedings in Ansbach. In the following two trials, the judges spoke of
the pogrom as a "cleansing thunderstorm". The trial of 24 SA members
who were involved in the incident were sentenced to low prison terms but
remained at large. A few weeks later, Obersturmführer Bär shot dead
Julius Strauss and seriously injured his father. Both had testified
against him before the district court in Ansbach. Bär was sentenced to
life imprisonment, but was released after three years.One
day before the Reichspogromnacht in 1938, the city bought the synagogue
from the Jewish community, so it was spared from pillage as a municipal
property due to the intervention of the district fire inspector Wilhelm
Braun. A week later, the domes were symbolically torn down. The Jewish
cemetery on Leonhardsruhstrasse was desecrated and largely destroyed. At
the beginning of November 1938, 64 Jews are said to have lived in
Gunzenhausen. In January 1939 Gunzenhausen declared itself Judenfrei. Gunzenhausen waited until 1981 to finally destroy the former synagogue
completely.
Weißenburg
Adolf-Hitler-Platz and today, renamed marktplatz. Birthplace of Gustav Ritter von Kahr who, as commisar of Bavaria helped turn post World War I Bavaria into Germany's centre of radical-nationalism, was then instrumental in the collapse and suppression of Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. In revenge for the latter, he was murdered later in the 1934 Night of the Long Knives. On Sunday July 19, 1931 the
Nazis held a large rally here in this medæival town, at which
Hitler spoke in three mass meetings. It was initially planned that
Hitler would speak following an open-air performance of Schiller's
Wilhelm Tell in Weißenburger's Bergwaldtheater. However, in a letter
dated July 15 the mayor, Hermann Fitz, informed Hitler that such an
address would not be allowed and attached a copy of a note from City
Commissioner Baer which would only approved the planned rallies could be
held in the hall of the Evangelical Club House, in the Wildbad Hall and
in the Goppel hall, whilst with reference to the order of the Bavarian
Ministry of the Interior from July 1 all other planned outdoor events
were banned. Hitler, contrary to his stated promise, did not arrive
until 15.00 and spoke in all three fully occupied halls, initially for ninety minutes, and then 45 minutes each. The Völkische Beobachter
claimed that an audience of over 2,500 people had attended. In addition
to Hitler, other prominent Nazis spoke including Gauleiters Julius
Streicher and Adolf Wagner. 
In
his speeches Hitler compared the Young Plan with the so-called Hoover
Plan and declared that in world history political debts would only be
erased by one's own efforts. So far according to Hitler, no people had
eliminated their political enslavement through work. To fathom the
causes of the extraordinarily difficult situation would go beyond the
horizon of party politicians. The current economic crisis was a world
crisis in which almost all white peoples were gripped by the same plague
of internal decomposition, and he declared that the question of the day
was whether, given the continuation of the present development fifty
years from now, the German people would still exist. The Nazis had set
themselves the goal of eliminating the internal disintegration of the
people that the bourgeois parties and Marxism intended. As he declared,
"[w]e would have to become one people again, then the indestructible
life force of our people will ultimately prevail." 
Two years earlier at the city council election on December 8, 1929, the Weißenburg city council received its first Nazi councillors. Whilst little is known of any political unrest or street battles in Weißenburg up until then, this would change by 1932 when, on
the afternoon of July 7, violent clashes between Social Democrats and
Nazis took place in the town council as the communist "Iron Front" held a
rally on the market square. Shortly before the end of the speech there
were "fights and stabbing;" a police report recorded in the
Weißenburger Zeitung the next day described a number of injured, with
one seriously so. On March 11, 1933, eleven communist functionaries and
seven Reichsbannerführer were taken into protective custody. According
to the Gleichschaltungsgesetz of March 31, 1933, the city council in
Weissenburg was reformed following the result of the Reichstag election
of March 5, 1933 leading to the Nazis being given ten seats, the
Black-White-Red battle front one seat, the Bavarian People's Party one
seat and the SPD three seats. These latter three councilors- Max Müller,
Wilhelm Böhner and Fritz Berger- declared their resignation on July 10,
1933 in a document stamped from the "Dachau Political Department" in
the concentration camp. The elected representative Friedrich Traber
resigned his office in July 1933 with his seat taken over by a Nazi
"according to popular opinion". 
On
March 23, 1933, by order of the deputy Gauleiter Karl Holz, a general
meeting of the Weissenburg local Nazi party took place in Nuremberg
which demanded the immediate leave of absence of Mayor Dr. Fitz and his
replacement to be the Nazi district leader, Michael Gerstner. Dr. Fitz,
informed by a confidante of his imminent arrest, had to leave town at
night. A year earlier, on April 14, 1932, the Nazi party leader in the
city council, Max Hetzner, had responded to Dr. Fitz after having asked for a vote of confidence that his group is "still ready to work in a
factual and completely independent manner for the good of our city."
In
so in much the same way the communists would later employ their 'salami
tactics' the strategy of the Nazis can be summed up in the quick
occupation of local positions of power. At
a point in time when the Nazis only had two seats in the Weißenburg
city council, Gerstner- who had never been elected, bypassed the elected
2nd mayor of the district government "in agreement with the supreme SA
leadership as acting deputy of the 1. Mayor of the city of Weißenburg i.
Bay." On March 27, 1933, the 2nd Mayor Michel handed over all official
business to him. In addition to the office of mayor as head of the city
administration, the Nazis occupied the office of head of the city police
in order to get the police force under their control. With this in
mind, the previous police commissioner Andreas Fischer was relieved of
his functions by a resolution of the Personnel Committee on June 21,
1933. The City Council (under the subject "Gleichschalt der Stadt
Police") followed a week later. After the retirement of the head of the
city police Elias Hohenberger, Franz Ohnesorg took over his position on
January 1, 1934 after he had been assessed
by Mayor Gerstner as having "always represented the interests of the
NSDAP." Five years after the war on September 14th, 1950, the Nuremberg
Chamber of Justice discontinued the denazification proceedings against
Ohnesorg. On March 27, 1933 Bahnhofstrasse was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Strasse.
The war itself ended in Weissenburg with the invasion of American troops on the
morning of April 23, 1945. They entered a deserted town- party
officials, mayor Hetzner and district leader Gerstner had already fled
and so Weißenburg was handed over by city treasurer Georg Schuster. The
war had left 589 people dead and missing among its residents. The
American military government initially removed anyone even marginally
suspected of Nazi ties and put new people in their place - often
regardless of their qualifications and suitability. The Weißenburg
military governor Bailey convened a meeting of Weißenburg citizens in
the "Wittelsbacher Hof" on May 6, 1945 in order to have them propose a
provisional mayor and a district administrator by election. Drug store
owner Friedrich Traber was elected and duly appointed by Bailey as mayor
of the city. An "advisory committee" to provide support (without
further powers) was also appointed by the military government at the
suggestion of the mayor on July 12, 1945; the first joint meeting took
place on August 3, 1945. Tremendous tasks awaited the new
administration. First there was the repair of the war damage in the
city. During an air raid on February 23, 1945, which was mainly aimed at
Ellingen, a US Air Force bomber dropped several cluster bombs over
Weißenburg. The area between the Am Hof square and the hospital
complex was hit, and 21 people died in the rubble. When the last German
soldiers withdrew, just minutes before the Americans arrived, they blew
up the station bridge to Gunzenhausener Strasse. First, a wooden bridge
was provisionally built, which was later replaced by a steel structure. In the Weißenburg pogrom trial held after the war, the largest pogrom process in the American zone of occupation to date, those responsible for the Kristallnacht violence against the Jewish population in the town of Treuchtlingen took place from 1946 to 1947. During it a total of 57 people were put on trial, including eight women and several children. Eleven defendants were acquitted and 46 people were sentenced to four years in prison. Michael Gerstner had protested his innocence, but was incriminated by the standard leader of the SA Georg Sauber and the ϟϟ-Obersturmbannführer Wilhelm Dorner and found to be one of the main people responsible.
Recently in 2014 a Weißenburg headteacher who shouted "Sieg Heil” to pupils at the start of her school's
annual mini car race caused a scandal and became the centre of an
investigation by Bavarian authorities given that such an utterance with
or without the right arm salute, is illegal in Germany.
A couple of miles away is Fortress Wülzburg, a Renaissance-era fortress east of Weißenburg situated on an hill 660 feet above the town. Originally a Benedictine monastery
dating from the 11th century, it is one of the best-preserved Renaissance
fortresses in Germany. It was converted into a fortress from 1588 to 1605
by George Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach. In the 19th century
it was an garrison of the Bavarian Army. During the Great War Charles
DeGaulle was imprisoned here. The Nazis also used it as a
prison camp during the war; it was here that the Czech composer
Erwin Schulhoff was held for over a year before he died of TB. After
the war it was a refugee camp when masses of refugees and displaced persons arrived at Weißenburg, some in an organised manner via the Wülzburg refugee camp. Within a few years Weißenburg's population
rose from just under 9,000 in 1939 to over 14,000 by 1950. Quickly
assembled wooden barracks, which still existed in the 1960s, served as
emergency shelters. The municipal housing office tracked down every
little space and occupied it with people looking for
accommodation. Within a few months, the city council got most of the
problems under control, the relationship with the military government
improved, and more powers were transferred back to the German
authorities.
The
fort was reinforced with stone structures and defences during the
course of the 2nd century; again, on the right below is a GIF comparing a
visualisation of how it may have appeared compared to the site today.
As can be seen in these images, the wall itself was surrounded by a
double moat; another moat has so far only been proven on three sides of
the fort. This pit system was only interrupted in the area of the camp
gates. On the northern front in 1986 the archaeological excavations
also cut into the moat. It was found that the outermost pointed ditch
was 2.70 metres wide and 1.60 metres deep. The middle trench was
measured with a width of 4.50 metres and a depth of 1.40 metres with the innermost trench widest at 5.40 metres. 
As
a special feature, this trench was created as the Fossa Punica. The
enemy-facing side was sunk vertically into the ground, whilst the side
facing the surrounding wall sloped. The garrison served there to secure the newly
conquered territory north of the Danube, which had been incorporated
into the province of Raetia. As the excavations of 1986 showed, the porta decumana existed on the northern front of the wood-earth bearing
made of twelve posts, six of which posts each belonged to one of the two
gate towers by which the actual gate was flanked. The two wooden
rectangular towers had a 3.20 x 3.60 metre floor plan. A palisade ditch
around 0.60 metres wide connected the gate on both sides with the
adjoining intermediate towers, each supported by four posts. After its
construction, it covered an area of 3.1 hectares, with sides measuring
175 × 179 metres. Weißenburg was destroyed between 240-250 along with nearby
Ellingen in the course of the Alemannic invasions. The latest coins found on the Via principalis dextra
date to the years 251 and 253. In the Middle Ages the site served as a
quarry for the new city until everything was removed and overgrown. The
fort was not rediscovered until 1885 and was excavated between 1889 and
1913.
The inner courtyard of the administration building, the principia. On the left is the
praetorium hypocaust and, inset, when it was excavated in the 1890s.
On the right is the well and how it has been virtually reconstructed.
Drake Winston on the right at the camp of the Numerus Brittonum
reenactment group on the grounds during a wet Römertage 2017. The
historical Numerus Brittonum was a Roman auxiliary unit of a nominal
strength of probably 160 men, consisting of two centuries with eighty
men each, probably all of whom were foot soldiers. The soldiers would
have been recruited in the province of Britannia when the unit was
established around 100 CE, possibly under Domitian. According to Marcus
Reuter, the British would have arrived to Germania superior as a closed
contingent and were only then divided into the individual units. He
assumes there would have been 1500 to 2000 British in this first
contingent.
Ellingen
Hitler driving through the town towards the Pleinfelder Tor whilkst campaigning.
The town hall, then and now. The year 1933 witnessed an explosion of physical attacks against Jews, particularly in rural areas. Of course, National Socialist policy itself was essentially violent. The young dictatorship established its power through open violence in the streets. Jews were no longer safe from physical attacks either outside or in their homes. For example, in Rothenburg, the SA occupied the house of the cattle-dealing Mann family for more than four weeks in March 1933. While the men were taken into ‘protective custody’ (Schutzhaft), the wife and his daughter remained in the house under an SA guard. After three weeks living in this way, the wife, Klara Mann, committed suicide. The men got out of ‘protective custody’ after a while, but, once released, Josef Mann had a nervous breakdown. Neither he nor his business ever recovered from the attack. The case was not unique. In the Bavarian provincial town of Ellingen, local Nazis rioted in front of the house of a cattle-dealer. The open violence against Jews continued for weeks. It had become a part of public life.Stefanie Fischer (10) Economic Trust in the ‘Racial State’
Ellingen
during the war roughly had about 1,500 inhabitants, most of whom were
farmers. The town itself had nothing of military value to attack and was
thus left totally unprepared when, on February 23, 1945, 25 USAAF
bombers dropped 285 high explosive bombs on the hamlet in a surprise
attack which left 120 bomb craters and killed the town’s farm animals
along with 98 villagers.
The schloss from a 1944 postcard and the Schlosskirche after the war with an American GI surveying the looted art recovered from the Nazis, and today.
Allersberg
Standing at the former Adolf-Hitler-Platz, its Nazi eagle-topped war memorial torn down. The war saw 75% of Allersberg destroyed by the time the Americans arrived on April 23, 1945 as units of the Waffen-ϟϟ including the the 17th ϟϟ Panzergrenadier continued to fiercely defend the town. The 501st Armoured Field Artillery Battalion had initially fired on
Allersberg and nearby enemy positions during the night of April 20,
Hitler's birthday. This action initiated a three-day battle. During the
night of April 22, the American XV Corps and 14th Armoured Division
artillery bombarded the German forces in Allersberg in preparation for
the impending attack led by the black American CCR Rifle Company. Moving
from Göggelsbuch through a wooded area toward Allersberg, the black
infantrymen were confronted at close range by two Tiger tanks that had
been concealed among the buildings at the edge of town. The black
soldiers held their ground, firing on the advancing tanks with their
rifles and submachine guns, whilst their bazooka teams took up positions
and opened fire. Several bazooka rounds found their targets but did not
penetrate the thick armor of the German tanks. As the enemy tanks
closed to within fifteen yards of the infantry positions, Pfc. Percy
Smith of the 1st Platoon fired his bazooka and succeeded in disabling
one of the Tigers. Private Smith was killed by return fire from the same
tank, and other soldiers were wounded.
At
a time when the Germans were collapsing all across the front, the
three-day battle at Allersberg had been particularly fierce, impressing
even the veterans of the 62d Armoured Infantry Battalion whose unit
history reported that the battalion’s “A Company made the attack with
CCR Rifle Company (Coloured). They will long remember the fighting there
and the Krauts ‘Tiger’ tanks.” Eventually the fighting claimed
200 deaths, 47 houses totally destroyed, and 150 families made homeless.
Leutershausen
Another former Adolf-Hitler-Platz below,
with the Nazi eagle removed from one of the building's façades.
Leutershausen was the third German city which appointed Hitler an honorary citizen in 1932. In 1948, the honorary citizenship was
revoked by the city council. In his book Henry Kissinger and the American Century, Jeremi Suri writes how
A monument on the side wall of the town cemetery commemorates the two Wehrmacht soldiers, Friedrich Döppel and Richard Köhler, who were shot dead by an ϟϟ commando in April 1945 due to desertion.[t]he anti-Semitic frenzy in Leutershausen reached such a height that local Nazis did not wait for the national party's call for what became the Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews. On Sunday evening, 16 October 1938—three weeks before Kristallnacht local residents vandalized the village's synagogue and broke the windows of homes belonging to Jews, including Falk and Fanny Stern. A young visitor to the Stern household at the time recounts the shock and anguish felt by Kissinger's grandfather. He reacted to the attacks with a determination to abandon his house and business in Leutershausen immediately. This prosperous German cattle merchant fled to Fürth, where he became an internal exile from his home, and died seven months later, at least in part from the personal stress of recent events. The Nazis deported Fanny Stern to Izbica, Poland, a holding location for the nearby Belzec extermination camp. She never returned.
Living his first ten years in Weimar Germany, Henry Kissinger had witnessed the weakness of democracy. His five teenage years under Nazi rule revealed the potential for popular and extreme violence within civilized society. The pogroms in Gunzenhausen and Leutershausen, as well as the "Hitler Youth kids" on the streets of Fürth, displayed the dangerous dynamics of mass action. The crowds that rampaged against Jews did not follow direct orders from the Nazi leadership. Instead they took politics and social change into their own hands, acting in the spirit of what they perceived as a larger Nazi program. This kind of popular, grassroots politics was a particular Nazi talent, and it frightened Kissinger when he experienced it in the 1930s and throughout his later career.
[A]rmy officers and ϟϟ units were determined to obey Hitler's orders to the last, the latter out of fanaticism and the former often because they feared the consequences of disobeying orders, although there were also fanatics in the officer corps. Sometimes an army unit was already installed in a town or village, and sometimes there was one nearby and available to be summoned by diehards who wanted them to prevent a surrender by citizens. Sometimes a village received a flying visit from an ϟϟ troop and had to reverse any measures already taken to dismantle defenses such as antitank barriers. This was the case in Leutershausen, in Bavaria, where an ϟϟ unit arrived shortly after a group of women had dismantled anti-tank barriers and forced the villagers to reassemble the barriers and prepare a bridge for demolition. The result of ϟϟ attempts to defend the village was that American forces used their superior firepower to destroy half of it.
Stoltzfus, Maier-Katkin (31) Protest in Hitler's “National Community”: Popular Unrest and the Nazi Response
Schwabach
raging. By the time of its capitulation on April 19, Schwabach In 1969, a national party convention of the extreme right NPD took place in the Schwabach Markgrafensaal. More recently the otwn's mayor, Matthias Thuerauf, sought to convince local legislators to posthumously strip the town's honorary citizenship from Nazi officials such as Hitler, Julius Streicher and Gauleiter Adolf Wagner. Among the towns that have revoked Hitler's citizenship in recent years is Bad Doberan, which did so shortly before the 2007 G-8 meeting in Heiligendamm. That same year, members of the Social Democratic Party in Lower Saxony tried to revoke Hitler's German nationality, a suggestion which drew criticism from the state's minister of the interior, Uwe Schunemann of the Christian Democratic Union party, who suggested that such a move could be seen abroad as an attempt to deny German history. Hitler was stateless when he was granted German citizenship on Feb. 26, 1932 after becoming a civil servant in Braunschweig, in the region now encompassed by Lower Saxony. His status enabled him to run for president that year.
Roth bei Nuremberg
Adolf-Hitlerstraße with the war memorial on the right and Adolf-Hitler-Platz. Note the 'NSDAP' letters on the Nazi headquarters on the left.
The
site of the former synagogue built in 1737 on Judengaße, now
Kugelbuehlstraße 44. Jews were first recorded as having a presence in
Roth bei Nuremberg in 1414. At its peak in 1837 there were about two
hundred Jews living in Roth. By the time Hitler became chancellor in
1933, there were nineteen Jewish living in the town, which amounted to
0.3% of the total of 5,840 inhabitants. There was apparently a strong
anti-Jewish atmosphere in the city. According to an essay by a
nine-year-old pupil at the municipal elementary school which was printed
in the September 1935 edition of the Nazi publication Der Stürmer,
children stood in front of Jewish shops shouting "Gentlemen, shame on
you for buying from the Jews, damn you!" and thus supported the boycott
of Jewish businesses. By the end of December 1935 all Jewish residents
left the city after being forced to sell their property, leading the
town to proclaim itself. After the departure of the last Jewish
inhabitants, the city was declared judenfrei and the synagogue’s
interior was ransacked. About fifteen Jews from Roth were killed during
the Nazi period according to the lists of Yad Vashem published in the
"Memorial Book - Victims of the persecution of the Jews under the
National Socialist tyranny in Germany 1933-1945" but, given that there
was also a Jewish community in another town named Roth in the state of
Hesse, the actual number is problematic. After 1945, some Jewish
survivors of concentration camps came to the city temporarily. In May
1946 there were sixteen Jews in the town, but after 1948 they all
emigrated, probably mostly to Israel. The synagogue was eventually
converted into an office building after the war before being used as a
youth centre. 
Ansbach
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At
the end of the war, nineteen-year-old student Robert Limpert actively
campaigned for the city to be handed over to Americans troops without a
fight. Betrayed by Hitler Youth, he was personally hanged at the gate of
the town hall by the town's combat commander, Colonel Ernst Meyer. In
the end, the former margravial envoy house on the Promenade, today the
seat of the Ansbach administrative court, became an office of the
American military government. In January 1946, the military
administration set up a DP camp to accommodate Jewish orphans in a
former lung sanatorium in what is now the Strüth district.
More recently Ansbach has seen its share of violence as with the 2009 shooting spree which occurred at the local Carolinum grammar school, in which nine students and one teacher were injured by a shooter further armed with an axe, two knives and three Molotov cocktails. On July 24, 2016 another Syrian refugee the Merkel government simply allowed into the country detonated a bomb in a restaurant, killing himself and injuring others.
Ermetzhofen
The
Ermetzhofen war memorial for the fallen of both world wars is located
on the right in front of the entrance to the local cemetery on the road
to Uffenheim. Below a Reichsadler and steel helmet and the inscription
"Die Gemeinde Ermetzhofen in gratitude to their brave heroes who fell in
the World War 1914 – 1918", the names of the fallen are listed,
including that of a Jewish German soldier second on the right column-
Holzer Siegl, born December 10, 1895 and killed in action on June 27, 1916. Another Ermetzhofen-born Jew who died for his country in the Great War
was non-commissioned officer Ludwig Stark, born
April 23, 1891. He had moved to Ulm before being sent to the front,
dying a mere month after the very start of the war on August 24,
1914.
A Jewish community existed in Ermetzhofen dating back to the 16th century until 1938. They settled after
Jews were expelled from almost all cities, for example from Rothenburg
ob der Tauber in 1519. The Margraves of Ansbach, the Barons of
Seckendorff and later also the Princes of Schwarzenberg allowed them to
take up residence in Ermetzhofen for a not insignificant fee. Most of
the Jewish local residents lived in modest circumstances. Since they
were generally not allowed to practice any trades, they subsisted on
trade and very small-scale farming.Records
in 1530 and 1593 refer to Jewish residents as well as during the time
of the Thirty Years' War. In the 18th century the number of Jewish
families in the area increased from four families in 1736 to nine in
1796 who were under the protection of the Barons von Seckendorff. By
1880 the number of Jewish residents increased to 103, making up 24.4% of a total of 422 residents in total. 
One testament to the history of the Jewish community here is the forlorn Jewish cemetery on the south-eastern outskirts of Ermetzhofen, first laid
out in 1564 and expanded in 1777. The historically
important Jewish district cemetery has been under monument protection
since 1979. The cemetery was a union cemetery for
deceased Jews from the Jewish communities of Burgbernheim, Ermetzhofen,
Gnodstadt, Uffenheim and Welbhausen. Already in 1926 the cemetery was
desecrated. When the Nazis took power gravestones were used to build a road to
Obermühl. In 1959 the cemetery was restored as best
as possible and there are still about four hundred tombstones in the cemetery. The
two oldest stones are from 1791 and 1794, the most recent from 1936.
Contrary to the Jewish tradition which envisages a simple gravestone
design, most of the graves are in the neoclassical and neo-Gothic style and several have show several specific symbols. For example, this grave showstwo hands representing the Kohanim, the
blessing hands of the priests appealing to the male descendants of
Aaron. As a descendant of the tribe of Aaron, one is born a priest
whereas one becomes a rabbi by virtue of training and ordination. A
priest can be a rabbi, but a rabbi can never become a priest unless he
is of the Aaronid lineage. In this case the hands are directed upwards,
thumb, index and middle finger face each other, but only thumb and index
finger are touching. Such positioning of the hands is used when the Kohanim bless the congregation in synagogue. Leonard Nimoy was Jewish, and took inspiration from his heritage to create the Vulcan gesture on Star Trek. Such a symbol indicates that the person buried here is therefore a Cohen- a descendent of Aaron given that it can only be used for a deceased male Cohen. 
Contrary to the Jewish tradition which envisages a simple gravestone
design, most of the graves are in the neoclassical and neo-Gothic style and several have show several specific symbols. For example, this grave showstwo hands representing the Kohanim, the
blessing hands of the priests appealing to the male descendants of
Aaron. As a descendant of the tribe of Aaron, one is born a priest
whereas one becomes a rabbi by virtue of training and ordination. A
priest can be a rabbi, but a rabbi can never become a priest unless he
is of the Aaronid lineage. In this case the hands are directed upwards,
thumb, index and middle finger face each other, but only thumb and index
finger are touching. Such positioning of the hands is used when the Kohanim bless the congregation in synagogue. Leonard Nimoy was Jewish, and took inspiration from his heritage to create the Vulcan gesture on Star Trek. Such a symbol indicates that the person buried here is therefore a Cohen- a descendent of Aaron given that it can only be used for a deceased male Cohen. 
The
grave shown on the left depicts the pitcher of the Levites, one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Levites were responsible for cleaning the hands of the Temple Priest or Cohen and this is what the symbol is depicting. Such a gravestone with this symbol shows that the deceased was a Levi. Like the
priests, the Levites have their own symbol of special belonging within
the Jewish community. Leviteship is also hereditary and can neither be
acquired nor discarded. In ancient times, the Levites assisted the
priests in the temple. The Levite poured the water on the priest's hands
before he extended his hands and blessed the congregation. Liberal
Judaism no longer distinguishes between affiliations by birth such as
priests, Levites and other Jews.
The stones showing a broken tree or column as seen in the examples shown left and centre, indicate that the deceased was of a life cut short. The central grave also shows a book symbolising the book of life. The stone on the right shows a Shofar- ram’s horn- one of the earliest symbols found on Jewish gravestones seen in the catacombs of Bet Shearim. It's derived from the biblical story of the sacrifice of a ram instead of Isaac as well as serving as a symbol of resurrection.
Various buildings bear
witness to the local Jewish history to this day. According
to Ilse Vogel, various structural features, some of which
differed regionally, were an expression of the piety of the builders
and Jewish citizens could recognise their co-religionists by them. There used to be a Jewish school at house number 98. After compulsory schooling was
introduced at the beginning of the 19th century, Jewish children
attended the Christian elementary school. In addition, they received
weekly religious instruction in their own school building, where the
Jewish religious teacher also lived. However, the house had to be
demolished after a fire in 2009 and no longer exists. That said, there are still a number of residences that remain such as house number 85/87 on the left. Apparently the five
windows on the courtyard side represent the five books of the Torah. These correspond to the five so-called books of
Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
Meanwhile at house number 101 seen
on the right the twin windows in the gable symbolise the tablets of the
law with the ten commandments. At house number 100 was located a Mikveh, a Jewish ritual bath. In fact, in
the 19th century there were several such ritual baths in Ermetzhofen
which were used for the purpose of ritual immersion to achieve ritual
purity by providing a bathing facility that remains in contact with a
natural source of water. In Orthodox Judaism, such a regulation is
steadfastly adhered to; consequently, the mikveh is central to an
Orthodox Jewish community although conservative Judaism also formally
holds to the regulations. The existence of a mikveh is considered so
important that a Jewish community is required to construct a mikveh even
before building a synagogue, and must go to the extreme of selling
Torah scrolls, or even a synagogue if necessary, to provide funding for
its construction.
A
Mezuzah at house number 61. Religious Jews fasten a capsule in which a
small roll of parchment is kept to the right doorpost of the house
entrance, as well as to room entrances. The beginning of the "Shema
Yisrael", the Jewish creed, is written on it in Hebrew "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord" (Deuteronomy 6:4). 
At the
entrance the two holes in which the Mezuzah was
fastened can still be seen. The building used to serve as a Jewish
butcher's shop where animals were ritually slaughtered and their meat
sold.
At the
entrance the two holes in which the Mezuzah was
fastened can still be seen. The building used to serve as a Jewish
butcher's shop where animals were ritually slaughtered and their meat
sold.The beginning of Nazi rule of course saw the local Jewish residents suffer from discrimination and boycotts. In 1933 there were still 34 Jews
living in Ermetzhofen (9.9% of the total population). Due to the
increasing reprisals and the effects of the economic boycott, twelve people
left the village by November 1938, and one member of the community died
during this time. Several weeks before the November pogrom of 1938 the
Jewish families were forced by the authorities to sell their houses.
During the November pogrom itself, all Jews were arrested, some arrested
and taken to the Dachau concentration camp; the rest asked to leave the
place immediately. By November 29, 1938, 21 Jewish residents had left
Ermetzhofen. Few were able to emigrate (two to China), most moved within
Germany (Munich, Würzburg, Augsburg, Frankfurt am Main). On November
30, 1938 , Ermetzhofen was Judenfrei, and the Jewish community was dissolved. In
1936, Jewish children were excluded from attending the Ermetzhöfer
elementary school. From then on they had to take the train every day to
the Jewish elementary school in Marktbreit, just under twenty miles
away. Some Jewish Ermetzhofers managed to emigrate to the United States,
Israel and even China. In October 1938, the Jewish citizens had to sell
their property. Shortly after Kristallnacht on November 19, 1938, the
last fifteen Jews were rounded up by force, interrogated in a cellar and
then taken to the Windsheim gaol. The district man there sent the women
and a child back to Ermetzhofen. There they were told that they had to
leave Ermetzhofen
the next day. With some belongings, the women left the town and fled to
larger cities. Most of these Jews were deported to extermination camps
in the early 1940s and murdered there.
