Walter Ott

The title of this article is ambiguous. For the German politician see Walter Ott (Politiker) .

Walter Ott (born November 1, 1928 in Aalen ; † December 8, 2014 in Buttenhausen ) was a German homeland researcher.

Life

Walter Ott was born in Aalen in November 1928 as the son of a railroad worker. Ott was a member of the Hitler Youth and trained in agriculture during the Second World War. He worked as a military builder in the Warthegau in Poland and saw how unworthy prisoners of war were treated. In 1946 he moved from Stuttgart to Buttenhausen and worked there in the Bruderhaus, which later became the Landheim. Here he met his future wife. Walter Ott died in December 2014 at the age of 86 in Buttenhausen near Münsingen. He was born with Anneliese Ott. Haug married and had five children.

Jewish history in Buttenhausen

As early as 1956, Ott found the first written evidence of the former Jewish community of Buttenhausen , which had existed since 1787, in the attic of a neighboring house . However, the last Jewish citizens of the village were deported to the concentration camps in 1943 . Including the last rabbi, Naphtali Berlinger .

In connection with a conversion of the main building of the Landheim, the former castle, Ott found several boxes with historical documents in 1973. Among the documents there was a lot of evidence of the 200-year Jewish history of the rural community, including For example, the “Jewish protection letter” from Reich baron Philipp Friedrich von Liebenstein (1730–1799) on the occasion of the settlement of the first 25 Jewish families in 1787. When studying the documents, Ott also came across the names of the Jewish families who had lived in Buttenhausen for centuries had worked. Since he did not get any satisfactory answers to his questions in town and even met with occasional resistance, he made memory work his very own business. Ott sorted and cataloged the papers and documents found in the boxes and boxes and supplemented them with research in the archives. In this way, a Jewish archive was created for the first time.

In addition to working on the abandoned Jewish cemetery , Ott also collected family certificates and tirelessly tried to establish contact with the descendants of the Buttenhausen Jews. In his limited free time, Walter Ott has also been rebuilding the Jewish cemetery on Mühlhalde, which was destroyed in the night of the Reichspogrom in 1938 and has since fallen into disrepair , together with his sons Heiner, Wolfgang and Reinhard since the mid-1970s . The tombs were cleaned, erected again and the inscriptions retraced. He thus offered the descendants the opportunity to return to the place of their history.

In the 1990s, his research and collecting activities finally turned into a small Jewish museum, which was housed in the Bernheimer Realschule . Ott has organized guided tours for school classes, former soldiers and other interested parties here for decades.

Walter Ott was also involved in local politics. Since 1980 he was active as a community and local council. After leaving the Münsingen city council in 1994, he served as a local councilor for Buttenhausen for another five years.

Honors

• 1985: Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon
• 1997: Otto Hirsch Medal
• 2010: Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Web links

• Article about Otts death in the Südwest Presse , accessed on December 22, 2014.

literature

• City of Münsingen (Hrsg.): Jews in Buttenhausen . Permanent exhibition in the Bernheimer Realschule Buttenhausen. Münsingen 1994
• City of Münsingen (ed.), Edited by Günter Randecker: Jews and their homeland Buttenhausen , Münsingen 1988.
• Eberhard Zacher: The pogrom of the 9./10. November 1938 in Buttenhausen . In: Geschichtsverein Münsingen (ed.), Münsinger Jahrbuch, 2nd year, Münsingen 2009, pp. 71–77.
• Dietrich Strothmann: The "little rabbi" from Buttenhausen . In: Die Zeit , June 17, 1983.