Gauting Jewish cemetery

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Memorial in the cemetery, which was inaugurated in October 1947.

The Gauting Jewish Cemetery was established for the deceased Jewish patients of the Gauting Lung Hospital . It is directly adjacent to the Gautinger forest cemetery. The first burials there took place in 1945, and the cemetery was officially opened in 1947; the inauguration was connected with the unveiling of a memorial for the six million Holocaust victims during the time of National Socialism , which is in the cemetery.

A total of 172 people were buried in the cemetery, 145 of the graves initially laid out are classified as war graves and may not be abandoned. After 1956/57, there were only a few burials, the last in 1996 and 1998. Since 1957, like the cemetery of a concentration camp, the cemetery has been looked after by the Bavarian Administration of State Palaces, Gardens and Lakes . Due to reburial, there are still 143 graves in the cemetery (as of 2011). Numerous gravestones and the memorial were renovated in 1997. The property is elongated, it is divided in the middle by a gravel path that leads to the monument.

History of the cemetery

After the US troops marched into Gauting on April 30, 1945, an existing hospital for lung patients was converted into a hospital for " Displaced Persons " (DPs). Most of the patients in this hospital were survivors from concentration camps , some of them also patients who had taken part in the death march from the Dachau concentration camp . Tuberculosis sufferers from around 30 nations were treated in the hospital . In the spring of 1946 the hospital organization was taken over by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration ; from mid-1947 it was administered by the International Refugee Organization IRO, a sub-organization of the UN.

When the first Jewish patients died in Gautinger Hospital, "the Jewish patient committee demanded a burial according to the Jewish rite at a separate burial site away from the Christian cemetery". The community provided an area south of the previous forest cemetery in Gauting, which was previously intended as an extension of the forest cemetery. The first burials took place here in 1945. A total of 468 hospital patients died between May 1945 and the end of March 1952, 128 of them were Jewish. Numerous burials in the cemetery in Gauting took place for the dead from the Jewish DP camps in Föhrenwald near Wolfratshausen and Feldafing . A description of all individual graves can be found in the volume by Constanze Werner.

The monument and its unveiling

The monument was placed in the central axis of the cemetery; it is made of artificial stone and is crowned by a metal Star of David . The initiative for the memorial came from the hospital's Jewish patient committee. The patient committee wanted the burial place of his dead to be remembered for the 6 million victims who had preceded them. The funds for the memorial were provided through “collections, donations and voluntary work by patients”. The inauguration took place on October 19, 1947 in the presence of numerous guests of honor. Participants were "representatives of the military government and the American army, the commissioner for religiously and racially persecuted persons, representatives of various Jewish institutions and also German authorities, including the mayor of Gauting, the district administrator of Starnberg and the Bavarian state secretary for refugees" Philipp Auerbach . One of the opening addresses was given by Mr. Lipszic, who had previously also been a patient in the hospital and who was the "actual initiator of the construction of the monument". The representative of the commissariat for racially and politically persecuted people was Rabbi Schnitzer, who had also previously been a patient at the hospital. The monument was unveiled by State Commissioner Philipp Auerbach and the doctor Dr. Knows who was the director of the hospital. The expectation was expressed that everything would also be done for the patients by the German side.

The text of the memorial reads in the translation given by Constanze Werner:

It intends
THE eternal people [= ISRAEL]
FOREVER HIS 'HOLY' [= MARTYRS];
IT IS DIPPED IN THE BLOOD OF HIS BATTLE SACRIFICE THE PEOPLE OF WRATH
THE KILLED HAS strangled HAS BURNED AND HAS MURDERED HAS
6 000 000
MARTYRS, OUR BROTHERS;
IN THE YEARS 5693-5705;
YOUR SOULS BE TIED UP IN THE BUNDLE OF LIFE

According to Walter Fürnrohr and Felix Muschialik, the Gautinger monument is "certainly one of the first, if not the first Holocaust memorial ever on German soil". In the extensive two-volume documentation “Memorials for the Victims of National Socialism” by Ulrike Puvogel and Martin Stankowski (1987, second edition 1995), the Gauting Jewish cemetery is mentioned, but the memorial is not mentioned. Both the first execution of the monument in 1947 and the renovation of the tombstones and the monument in 1997 were carried out by the Thaler stonemason in Gauting.

literature

  • Walter Fürnrohr , Felix Muschialik: Survival and a new beginning. DP Hospital Gauting from 1945. Kirchheim-Verlag, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-87410-102-9 . (Contains an extensive facsimile of the magazine Our Life , which was created by patients in the Gautinger Hospital, and a complete list of all Jewish and non-Jewish dead in the hospital)
  • Walter Fürnrohr: Gauting Jewish cemetery. In: 100 Years of the Gauting Forest Cemetery. Editor and publisher: Society for Archeology and History Oberes Würmtal eV, Gauting, Gauting 2012, ISBN 978-3-936300-75-8 , pp. 140–151.
  • Constanze Werner: Concentration camp cemeteries and memorials in Bavaria. Schnell and Steiner, Regensburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-7954-2483-1 , pp. 55-61.
  • Israel Schwierz: Stone evidence of Jewish life in Bavaria. A documentation. Bavarian State Center for Political Education, Munich 1988, pp. 298–299.

Web links

Commons : Holocaust Memorial in Gauting  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Constanze Werner: Concentration camp cemeteries and memorials in Bavaria. Schnell and Steiner, Regensburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-7954-2483-1 , pp. 55-61.
  2. ^ A b c Walter Fürnrohr: Gauting Jewish cemetery. In: 100 Years of the Gauting Forest Cemetery. Society for Archeology and History Oberes Würmtal eV, Gauting (editor and publisher), Gauting 2012, ISBN 978-3-936300-75-8 , pp. 141–142.
  3. ↑ see Walter Fürnrohr, Felix Muschialik: Survival and New Beginning. DP Hospital Gauting from 1945. Kirchheim-Verlag, Munich 2005, p. 71, the authors cite Karl Mayr: Gauting and Stockdorf: 1870–1978. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-422-00784-9 , p. 305.
  4. ↑ Walter Fürnrohr, Felix Muschialik: survival and new beginnings. DP Hospital Gauting from 1945. Kirchheim-Verlag, Munich 2005, p. 42.
  5. ↑ a first name is not mentioned in the writings of Fürnrohr and the magazine "Our Life"
  6. ↑ Walter Fürnrohr , Felix Muschialik: survival and new beginnings. DP Hospital Gauting from 1945. Kirchheim-Verlag, Munich 2005, p. 43.
  7. ↑ Constanze Werner: Concentration camp cemeteries and memorials in Bavaria. Schnell and Steiner, Regensburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-7954-2483-1 , p. 60.
  8. ↑ See Fürnrohr and Muschialik: Survival and New Beginning. 2005, p. 72.
  9. ↑ see download of the second edition on this page, see State of Bavaria in volume 1, p. 141. In the volume by Schwierz: Stone Testimonies from 1988, a photo of the monument is included.

Coordinates: 48 ° 4 ′ 20 "  N , 11 ° 23 ′ 31.8"  E