Aaron Ohrstein

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Aaron Ohrstein , also Aaron Orenstein (born September 17, 1909 in Berlin ; died May 25, 1986 in Munich ) was a German rabbi .

Life

Ohrstein attended the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in Breslau between 1928 and 1934 , passed the rabbinical examination in 1935 and obtained his doctorate in Prague in May 1935 . He then worked as a preacher and teacher in Berlin under the conditions of the persecution of the Jews in National Socialist Germany . In 1937 he became rabbi at the synagogue of the private religious association Agudath Achim in Berlin-Pankow . On October 30, 1938, Ohrstein was expelled from the German Reich as a stateless person as part of the Poland campaign and brought to the Polish border . In Poland he worked as the director of an orphanage near Warsaw .

During the German invasion of Poland in early September 1939, he fled to Tarnopol , which was occupied by the Soviet Union as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact . There he worked in the Jewish community. In 1941 the Wehrmacht conquered Galicia and the Jewish population was imprisoned in ghettos in August 1941. Ohrstein was able to escape the deportations in 1943 and survived the Shoah underground, while his relatives perished in Auschwitz and Treblinka . At the end of the war, he came to Munich as a Displaced Person .

Ohrenstein early November 1945 Chief Rabbi in Munich and was 1947-1955 rabbi in Bavaria. In Munich he met in November 1948 published by the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Franz Josef Schöningh , former Deputy District Chief of the German occupation administration in Tarnopol. In another meeting with Ohrstein, Schöningh played down his activities in Tarnopol, and Ohrstein confirmed for Schöningh on behalf of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (IKG) a general exoneration letter from Dan Georg Bronner, also from Tarnopol, dated January 15, 1951.

The IKG-Bayern had to look after the Jews who had emigrated from Eastern Europe and who were housed in DP camps in the Munich and Nuremberg areas, and represented their interests. Ohrstein's activity stood in the field of tension between various expectations: The Zionists expected his support for the rapid emigration of European Jews to Palestine , resp. Israel , as well as the transfer of all property claims of the Israelite communities expropriated by the National Socialists and the Holocaust victims to international Jewish organizations . The re-established local Jewish religious communities, on the other hand, tried to solve the restitution questions in the sense of having the means themselves and thus helping the displaced persons. German society and its politicians, especially those who won aryanization among them, as well as the authorities and civil servants who were riddled with former NSDAP members, wanted to get the survivors out of Germany with as little effort and money as possible. Since the payment dates for the compensation claims collided with the emigration dates, the German bureaucracy also pre-financed payment claims in order to enable the victims to leave the country immediately. Mainly German credit institutions enriched themselves in the financing of the loans. There were now also falsified entitlements to compensation and transfer of entitlements with pragmatic or fraudulent intent. Ohrstein was accused of having carelessly certified such incorrect or forged documents. He also undermined the already unbureaucratic working method of the Bavarian State Commissioner for Racially, Religiously and Politically Persecuted People, Philipp Auerbach . Ohrstein therefore became a co-defendant in the trial against Auerbach and two of his employees in the context of the so-called Auerbach affair, which involved the embezzlement of funds from reparation claims by Nazi victims. The German judiciary carried out the process with an anti-Semitic zeal for persecution. Ohrstein was sentenced to one year in prison and a fine of 10,000 DM for fraud and subsequently lodged largely unsuccessful appeals against the verdict, but remained in his position as long as the opposition group Block for Law and Cleanliness on the scene within the Munich community called, in which Yitzchak Zieman was involved. In 1955, Ohrstein lost his job with the Israelite Community in Munich and Upper Bavaria . Ohrstein was also accused of bribing the Bavarian Justice Minister Josef Müller with 20,000 DM in the first half of 1950, which Müller had admitted. The reporting in the publications Stern and Der Spiegel served the readers with anti-Semitic stereotypes .

In March 1965, Ohrstein was heard as a witness by the Graz Regional Court in the trial of the Gestapo Jewish officer in Tarnopol, Friedrich Lex .

Fonts

  • Chasdai Cresca's teaching on free will . Dissertation, Prague 1935.

literature

  • Michael Brocke , Julius Carlebach : Biographisches Handbuch der Rabbis. Part 2: The rabbis in the German Empire 1871–1945. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2009 (online as pdf: [1] ).
  • Juliane Wetzel : Jewish life in Munich, 1945–1951. Transit station or reconstruction? (= Dissertation Munich 1986.) Commission publishing house Uni-Druck, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-87821-218-6 .
  • Jaromír Balcar, Thomas Schlemmer (Ed.): At the top of the CSU. The governing bodies of the Christian Social Union 1946 to 1955. Oldenbourg, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58069-3 .
  • Knud von Harbou : ways and astray. Franz Josef Schöningh, the co-founder of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. A biography. Allitera, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-86906-482-6 .
  • Tarnopoly. In: Guy Miron (ed.): The Yad Vashem encyclopedia of the ghettos during the Holocaust. Volume 2. Jerusalem 2009, ISBN 978-965-308-345-5 , pp. 809-812.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Precise life data according to: Jael Geis: Remaining - Life "afterwards": Jews of German origin in the British and American zones of Germany 1945-1949 , Philo & Philo Fine Arts, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-8257-0190-5 , p. 142.
  2. ↑ different information on Juliane Wetzel's curriculum vitae: Jüdisches Leben in München , in: Werner Bergmann, Julius H. Schoeps [Hrsg.]: Life in the land of perpetrators: Jews in post-war Germany (1945-1952) . Berlin: Jewish publishing institute. 2001, here p. 86.
  3. ↑ a b Michael Brocke, Julius Carlebach: Biographical Handbook of the rabbis. The rabbis in the German Empire 1871–1945. 2009, p. 471 f.
  4. ↑ a b c Knud von Harbou: Ways and astray. Franz Josef Schöningh, the co-founder of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. A biography. Allitera, Munich 2013, p. 262 f.
  5. ↑ Clay in Potter's hand. Auerbach trial . In: Der Spiegel . No. 27 , 1952 ( online ).
  6. ↑ Wolfgang Kraushaar : The Auerbach Affair. In: Julius H. Schoeps : Life in the land of perpetrators. Jews in post-war Germany (1945–1952). Jüdische Verlagsanstalt, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-934658-17-2 .
  7. ↑ Auerbach. Which never came up. In: Der Spiegel . No. 34 , 1952 ( online - Aug. 20, 1952 ).
  8. ^ Isaac Zelig Zieman , at Leo Baeck Institute. Center for Jewish History.
  9. ↑ Der SPIEGEL reported ... In: Der Spiegel . No. 16 , 1955 ( online - 13 April 1955 ).
  10. ↑ In 1950 a Volkswagen was priced at just under DM 4000.
  11. ↑ Monika Halbinger: The Jewish in the weekly newspapers Zeit, Spiegel and Stern (1946-1989): reporting between popularization efforts, appropriation and defense . Meidenbauer, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-89975-728-6 , pp. 81-145.
  12. ↑ Kleines Volksblatt , March 26, 1965. Here after Sabine Loitfellner: The reception of jury trials for Nazi crimes in selected Austrian newspapers 1956-1975. Inventory, documentation and analysis of published historical images on a forgotten chapter of contemporary Austrian history , p. 108. PDF, 806 kB on nachkriegsjustiz.at.
personal data
SURNAME Ohrstein, Aaron
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Orenstein, Aaron
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German rabbi
DATE OF BIRTH 17th September 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH May 25, 1986
Place of death Munich