Ahlem Israelite Horticultural School

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Ahlem Israelite Horticultural School
The grounds of the Israelitische Erziehungsanstalt around 1900
type of school professional school
founding 1893
closure 1942
place Ahlem
country Lower Saxony
Country Germany
Coordinates 52 ° 22 '39 "  N , 9 ° 40' 22"  E Coordinates: 52 ° 22 '39 "  N , 9 ° 40' 22"  E
carrier Association for the promotion of horticulture and handicraft lessons in Jewish elementary schools

The Ahlem Israelite Horticultural School was a Jewish school founded in Ahlem near Hanover in 1893 as the “Israelite Educational Institution at Ahlem near Hanover” . It served the Jewish population as a supraregional, boarding school for horticultural and craft trades . The founder was the Hanoverian banker Alexander Moritz Simon . In 1919 the facility was renamed "Israelite Horticultural School Ahlem". During the time of National Socialism , buildings on the site were used as Jewish houses and offices as well as a prison for the Gestapo . Today the area belongs to the Lower Saxony Chamber of Agriculture and is the seat of the Justus von Liebig vocational school . It is also the central memorial in the Hanover region for the National Socialist persecution of Jews .

prehistory

Former director's house on the street front, on the right the entrance gate with a memorial

At the end of the 19th century, thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe immigrated to the German Empire . In the cities they mostly lived in slums or in poor conditions. In Hanover, the number of people increased tenfold from 500 to around 5000 people of Jewish faith at the beginning of the 20th century. The wealthy Jewish banker Alexander Moritz Simon tried since the 1880s to improve the economic and social situation of his co-religionists in Hanover - according to his motto: "Our poor co-religionists can be helped not through alms, but through education for work." In one of The school he had donated to him in Hanover on Ohestrasse, he began with practical lessons. The association he founded in 1884 to promote horticultural and handicraft lessons in Jewish elementary schools did not achieve its goals.

Israelite Educational Institution (1893-1919)

In the autumn of 1884, Alexander Moritz Simon acquired an 18 hectare property near Hanover in the then still independent village of Ahlem at Heisterbergallee 8 and began to build a horticultural school. Nine years later, on June 2, 1893, it was opened under the name Israelitische-Erziehungs-Anstalt zu Ahlem near Hanover . From 1896 to 1930 Albert Silberberg was the director of the school, which was designed for 150 students. In order to improve their social situation, Jewish students were able to learn practical, industrial professions that were traditionally denied them (“ redeployment ”). During the training, the students were housed on the premises as a boarding school.

The girls' house built around 1900

A number of buildings were built on the site, such as the director's house, the shoemaker's house, the girls' house, a “ Laubhütte ” building and other farm buildings and greenhouses. The establishment of the girls' home was financially also by the B'nai B'rith belonging UOBB Zion Lodge XV. No. 360 from Hanover supported.

Fields and flower beds as well as a tree nursery and orchards were created on the premises of the facility. The school's nursery included the areas of vegetables (for markets in Hanover), plantations (with fruit trees) and agriculture (root crops, grain). Initially, the areas of horticulture, agriculture and handicrafts (shoemakers, bakers, tailors, carpenters, plumbers, electricians) were mediated for male young people. Later the girls' housekeeping was added. The three-year apprenticeship training ended for the students with an examination at the Chamber of Agriculture. Some of the instructors later became well known: Julius Höxter worked as a teacher and educator in the institution from 1893 to 1896; Heinrich Zeininger was garden inspector of the plantation from 1898 to 1902.

Israelite Horticultural School (1919–1942)

In 1919 the school was renamed "Israelitische Gartenbauschule Ahlem". Manfred Berliner took part in the management . A well-known student and later teacher (1927-28) was Martin Gerson , a German pioneer for the Hachschara .

Street sign in Ahlem with a legend about Leo Rosenblatt

From 1929 Leo Rosenblatt headed the horticultural school, the chairman of the board of trustees was the medical officer Leo Catzenstein .

Immediately after the National Socialists came to power in 1933, the number of applications for membership increased enormously. In 1935 there were over 500 registrations for the almost 100 apprenticeship positions annually. Since 1933, the training has mainly focused on emigration to Palestine . The remote school was a relatively safe retreat for Jewish youth during the Nazi era. The Israelite Horticultural School was tolerated by the National Socialists until it was banned in 1942 for two reasons: It was far from settlement and it prepared the students for their emigration from Germany. Many school leavers emigrated to Palestine (later the State of Israel ). There they founded nurseries and did development work. Many former students trained the local population in agriculture as well as in gardening and landscaping. Students from Hanover were also involved in the planning and establishment of new settlements.

The school had a supraregional and international significance, as the students came from all over Germany, Eastern Europe, and in individual cases also from Palestine. In total, around 2,000 boys and girls have received training in the almost 50 years that the school has existed.

The horticultural school was the owner of a bronze sculpture runner at the finish line by Alexander Oppler .

Judenhaus and central collection point (1941–1945)

School building from 1897, later the Judenhaus

During the November pogrom of 1938 , the synagogue in Hanover was set on fire and around 120 shops and apartments of Jewish citizens were destroyed. The horticultural school, located outside the city and isolated from the buildings in the village of Ahlem, survived the attacks unscathed. School operations continued and only stopped in 1942 when Jewish schools were closed throughout the German Reich. On September 3 and 4, 1941, “Aktion Lauterbacher ” led to the ghettoization of the Jewish families in Hanover. They were assigned to 15 Jewish houses , one of which was on the grounds of the horticultural school. From December 1941 to January 1944, eight transports with a total of around 2200 Jewish children, women and men left Hanover for the eastern concentration and extermination camps . The school grounds in Ahlem functioned as the central collection point for Jews in the districts of Hanover and Hildesheim . The first transport brought 1001 people to Riga . Before being transported, they were crammed together in greenhouses for days. The removal took place via the Linden-Fischerhof station . A total of 2,174 Jews, including 277 Ahlemer, were deported to the Riga , Warsaw , Theresienstadt ghettos and the Auschwitz concentration camp . In the Jewish house on the grounds of the horticultural school, the last 27 Jewish citizens of Hanover survived the war until the invasion of American troops on April 10, 1945. These were people living in mixed marriages .

Gestapo office and prison (1943–1945)

Foundation walls of the tabernacle , converted by the Gestapo into a place of execution

In 1943 a Gestapo office and prison were set up in the director's house and in the neighboring boarding school building. The reason was the bombing of the Gestapo office in the air raids on Hanover . Up to 1,200 people were temporarily detained in the prison. Most of them were foreign forced laborers and prisoners of war who were brought in for misconduct. In the final phase of the Second World War , the Gestapo executed prisoners by hanging them in the "leaf hut" of the horticultural school . There is evidence of executions of 86 forced laborers from Italy, Poland and the Soviet Union. According to the memories of the prison director, an SS member who was later convicted , there should have been a total of 400 people.

After the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , around 90 people were taken into protective custody in Hanover and imprisoned in the Gestapo prison in Ahlem. Most of them were politicians from the SPD and KPD , including Kurt Schumacher , Karl Wiechert and Richard Borowski .

Shortly before the capture of Hanover on April 10, 1945, members of the Gestapo office burned incriminating material, including about the executions, in the horticultural school's tabernacle. Burn scars on a neighboring chestnut still bear witness to this today. On April 6th, members of the Gestapo agency committed a final crime . They drove prisoners from the horticultural school, mainly Soviet prisoners of war and forced laborers, to the Seelhorster cemetery in Hanover, where they killed 154 people.

Todays use

Memorial with inscription and wreaths at the old entrance gate next to the former director's house
Memorial after the renovation (February 2015)

After the Second World War, there were several structural changes on the site. The shoemaker's house at the entrance and an outbuilding of the director's house were demolished. The entrance gate was moved back from the street front next to the director's house.

The property of the horticultural school was administered by the state of Lower Saxony from 1945, as the property rights were blocked. In 1952 the property was handed over to the Jewish Trust Corporation , which sold it to the Lower Saxony Chamber of Agriculture in 1955 .

Ahlem reminder and memorial

The Ahlem memorial has existed on the site since 1987. It essentially documents the history of this place as well as that of the inhabitants of the Jewish faith of the city of Hanover and the former district. One room at the Ahlem memorial is named after Martin Gerson . It was redesigned and redesigned between 2012 and 2014.

Justus von Liebig School

The school named after Justus von Liebig was built in the late 1980s on part of the grounds of the horticultural school. It is a vocational school that offers training in floristry , horticulture , agriculture and animal care at the Ahlem site .

House of Hope Ahlem

The girls' house was bought in 2003 by the Christian drug therapy facility New Land . As the House of Hope, it is currently being expanded into an aftercare center. There is already a public café ( Café Jerusalem ) and a room of remembrance, which tells the story of the horticultural school and especially the house, and the work of return - the specialist office for excessive media consumption - is housed in the House of Hope.

See also

literature

  • Andrea Brait: Ways to multi-layered places of memory on local, regional, national and transnational level. An analysis with special consideration of the redesign of the Ahlem memorial. In: Janina Fuge, Rainer Hering, Harald Schmid (eds.): Memory spaces. Images of history and cultures of remembrance in Northern Germany. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht unipress, Göttingen 2014, pp. 367–384
  • Stefanie Burmeister Ed .: Ahlem Memorial at the site of the Ahlem Jewish Gardening School. Verlag Mahn- und Gedenkstätte der Hannover Region, Ahlem Memorial, 2014 exhibition catalog
  • Ruth Enis: The Impact of the "Israelite Horticultural School Ahlem" on Landscape Architecture in Israel. In: The garden art .  10, No. 2, 1998, pp. 311-330.
  • H. Hickmann: 100 years of teaching and research institute for horticulture of the Hanover Chamber of Agriculture, Justus-von-Liebig-Schule Ahlem, former Israelite horticultural school 1893-1993. Hanover 1993 OCLC 936017197
  • Friedel Homeyer: 100 years of the Israelitische Erziehungsanstalt - Israelitische Gartenbauschule 1893–1993, reminder and memorial of the district of Hanover in Ahlem. Hanover, 1993 DNB 931610125
  • Matthias Horndasch : You can suppress, but not forget. The memories of contemporary witness and Holocaust survivor Gerd Landsberg. (= Series of publications by the Ahlem Memorial, 2) Hannover 2005 ISBN 3-00-015808-1
  • Matthias Horndasch: "I have the pictures in front of my eyes every night." The testimony of the Nachum Rotenberg. (= Series of publications by the Ahlem Memorial, 3) Hannover 2006, ISBN 3-00-017910-0 .
  • Matthias Horndasch: Traces of my father. The testimony of Ruth Gröne (née Kleeberg). (= Series of publications by the Ahlem Memorial, 5) Hanover 2006, ISBN 3-00-020565-9 .
  • Ernst Gottfried Lowenthal: The Ahlem Experiment: a brief survey of the "Jewish Horticultural School". In: Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook , 14. London 1969 ISSN  0075-8744 pp. 165-181 (German-language reprint: Landkreis Hannover (Hrsg.): The Ahlem experiment: a brief overview of the Jewish horticultural school. Hannover 1969, OCLC 256240766. )
  • Herbert Obenaus : "Be quiet, otherwise you will come to Ahlem!": On the function of the Gestapo office in the former Israelite Horticultural School of Ahlem (1943–1945). (= Cultural information. Volume 16). City of Hanover, The City Director, Cultural Office (ed.). Hanover 1988. (= modified special edition with a supplement from: Hannoversche Geschichtsblätter. NF Volume 41, 1987, pp. 301–327)
  • The fate of a great idea: 100 years ago the only Israelite horticultural school was opened, its terrible end began a little more than 50 years ago, and now there is a lot of flourishing young life in Ahlem again. In: Niedersächsischer Heimatbund (Hrsg.): Lower Saxony: magazine for culture, history, home and nature since 1895. Special edition. Volume 94, Berlin 1994, pp. 17-20. ZDB ID 207172-1
  • Hans-Dieter Schmid (Ed.), Marlis Buchholz et al. : Ahlem: the history of a Jewish horticultural school and its influence on horticulture and landscape architecture in Germany and Israel , Edition Temmen, Bremen 2008, ISBN 978-3-86108-039-8 .
  • Hans-Dieter Schmid: In search of the library of the Israelite Horticultural School Ahlem. In: Regine Dehnel (Ed.): Nazi looted property in libraries. Search, results, prospects. Third Hanover Symposium. (= Journal for Libraries and Bibliography. Special volume. 94.). Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-465-03588-6 , pp. 85-95.
  • Hans-Dieter Schmid: Theodor Lessing and the Israelite horticultural school Ahlem. A legend. In: Hannoversche Geschichtsblätter . Volume 52, special issue, 1998, pp. 289-295. ZDB ID 21221224
  • Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn , Marlis Buchholz: The Israelite Horticultural School Ahlem near Hanover. A special facet in the history of garden culture. In: City and Green. The garden authority. Vol. 49, no . 4, Berlin 2000 ISSN  0948-9770 pp. 269-275

Web links

Commons : Ahlem Memorial  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dirk Böttcher : Hannoversches biographical lexicon.
  2. ↑ Ingeborg Pauluhn: Jewish migrants in the seaside resort of Norderney 1893-1938 with special consideration of the children's rest home UOBB. Zion Lodge XV. No. 360 Hanover and Jewish businesses , Igel-Verlag Literatur & Wissenschaft, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86815-541-9 , p. 39
  3. ↑ Compare the documentation at Commons (see under the section Weblinks )
  4. ↑ Note: Other secondary sources name 1930 as the beginning of Rosenblatt's leadership; compare NN : Rosenblatt, Leo , subpage on ghetto-theresienstadt.info of the Kulturverein Schwarzer Hahn eV last accessed on August 26, 2013.
  5. ↑ Peter Schulze : Catzenstein, Leo. In: Dirk Böttcher, Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein, Hugo Thielen: Hannoversches Biographisches Lexikon . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2002, ISBN 3-87706-706-9 , p. 84 ( online via Google books )
  6. ↑ Ahlem Memorial. on: hannover.de
  7. ↑ a b A tour through Ahlem. ( Memento from August 2, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) on: hannover.de
  8. ↑ The new Ahlem memorial: redesign and concept. ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) on: hannover.de
  9. ↑ New Land - Café Jerusalem. Archived from the original on February 21, 2013 ; Retrieved December 26, 2012 .