Jewish retirement home Herrlingen

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The Jewish retirement home in Herrlingen was a compulsory retirement home for older Jewish people that existed from autumn 1939 to summer 1942 on the site of the former Herrlingen country school home and its subsequent facility, the Herrlingen Jewish country school home .

The history

The history of the two country school homes in Herrlingen is part of the history of the old people's home .

After it was already foreseeable in late autumn 1938 that the Jüdisches Landschulheim would have to close, the owner registered in the land register, Fritz Essinger, Anna Essinger's brother, looked for a way to sell the Landschulheim grounds and the buildings on it. As he was already living in Palestine at the time , he commissioned the Klett private bank in Ulm to sell the property, which included the following buildings:

  • The main building built in 1926 with the address at that time Wippinger Steige 28 (today: Erwin-Rommel-Steige 50). At the time of the Jewish country school home, it was called the Bialik House . From autumn 1939 to summer 1942 it housed the Jewish old people's home.
  • The auxiliary building Wippinger Steige 11 (today: Erwin-Rommel-Steige 11). The building erected in 1932 was called the Bubenhaus or House of Lords and was renamed the Ramban House at the time of the Jewish country school home .
  • The house Wippinger Steige 13 (today: Erwin-Rommel-Steige 13). This house, which Gertrud Kantorowicz lived in from 1921 to 1926 , was acquired by Anna Essinger in 1932. In the following years it experienced an eventful history. During the times of the Landschulheim, it was referred to as the Breitenfels or Martin-Buber-Haus and, from 1943 to 1945, also as the Rommel Villa because it housed the Field Marshal's family . The Rommel family lived here between 1943 and 1945; then the house was bought by the Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO). Martin Buber and the Center for Jewish Adult Education held a conference in
    this house from May 10 to 13, 1934 . Today the house is called     Haus Friedenthal .

The bank offered the entire property of the city of Ulm for sale, which although expressed interest, could not decide to buy. Fritz Essinger then left the property to the senior councilor of the Israelite religious community in Württemberg for fiduciary management.

Foundation of the old people's home

As early as February 3, 1939, the Jewish trustees of the Herrling estate applied for permission from the Gestapo in Stuttgart to set up a Jewish old people's home for the accommodation of older relatives from families whose younger members had already emigrated. Approval for this was granted on April 27, 1939, and between May 11 and 13, 1939, Berta Dornacher, the gardener Hans Löwenstein, and the housemaid Gertrud Cahn arrived in Herrlingen to take care of the building for its new use to prepare.

The retirement home was set up against the bitter resistance of the Herrlingen community and its mayor, who wanted to prevent Jews from settling in their area of ​​responsibility. But the Gestapo defied this resistance because it had long been pursuing other goals. On April 30, 1939, the law on tenancy agreements with Jews was passed at the Reich level . This law, which deprived Jewish tenants of the statutory tenant protection, resulted in older Jews from Ulm, Stuttgart and many communities in the Herrlingen area being able to be deprived of their right of residence because they had alternative living space in Herrlingen. The Jewish retirement home planned by the Upper Council of the Israelite Religious Community had been converted into a system-compliant forced retirement home , which was already fully occupied with 70 residents at the end of September 1939. Further admissions took place in the following years, so that at the end of 1941 93 residents were forced to live in the facility.

Difficult everyday life

It was difficult to provide the residents of the retirement home with food because the home was disadvantaged in terms of food allocation. In addition, there were the difficult living conditions under National Socialist rule. As a result, the old people's home was not spared from harassment by the authorities (confiscation of “harmful and undesirable literature”, only small personal belongings for the home residents, basically only one room for married couples, complete registration of the home residents in the Jewish files ). These measures were tightened after the outbreak of the Second World War , and private radios were confiscated. The first deportation took place in early December 1941 . Presumably due to the disappearance of four younger nursing staff, another member of the nursing staff received a deportation order. Your trace is lost in Riga. In March 1942, a seventy-three-year-old resident of the home was transferred to the Zwiefalten sanctuary and nursing home , where she was killed with a poison injection. Six weeks later, eight residents - including two home workers who had fled to their home communities and picked up there - were deported to the Polish ghetto Izbica , which served as a transit camp to the Belzec , Majdanek and Sobibor extermination camps .

Dissolution of the home

During all these years there has been a constant tussle over the property of the Jewish old people's home. The municipality of Herrlingen wanted to take possession of parts in order to be able to build a road, and the city of Ulm repeatedly discussed taking over the site for its own purposes. Negotiations with the High Council of the Israelite Religious Community as the trustee did not take place. A new situation did not arise until the Eleventh Ordinance on the Reich Citizenship Act, passed on November 25, 1941 . According to this ordinance, the domestic property of emigrated Jews fell to the German Reich , and according to the legal opinion of the city of Ulm, those houses from Jewish ownership that the city had planned to acquire had now become imperial property. The city's intention to acquire the Herrlinger property failed due to the regional finance office, for whom the purchase price offers were too low. The Oberfinanzpräsidium complied with Ulm's request to build an urban retirement home in Herrlingen, but by agreeing to a rental. That meant the end of the Jewish retirement home. In order to be able to realize the plans of the city of Ulm, the houses had to be cleared in June and July 1942 and the remaining 83 Jewish residents relocated to the then rather shabby Oberstotzingen Castle . From there they were deported in August 1942 to the concentration camp, euphemistically referred to as the "Reichsaltersghetto", after the remaining assets had been stolen from them with "home purchase contracts" for Theresienstadt.

At the end of 1942, the city of Ulm's Aryan old people's home went into operation . However, the ownership of the property remained unresolved. They remained the property of the German Empire, but were probably administered in trust by the city of Ulm. In 1945/46 the Landschulheim buildings were returned to the Essinger family, who sold them to the Arbeiterwohlfahrt . After they were no longer used, they are now privately owned.

literature

  • Ulrich Seemüller: The Jewish Retirement Home Herrlingen and the Fates of its Residents , published by the community of Blaustein , was probably published in 1997. A second revised and expanded edition of the book has been published under the same title by: Süddeutsche Verlags-Gesellschaft, Ulm, 2009, ISBN 978- 3-88294-403-7 . In the above article the first edition is used.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ulrich Seemüller: The Jewish old people's home in Herrlingen and the fates of its residents , Gemeinde Blaustein, 1997, p. 13. On pages 13 and 14, the book contains good photographs of the houses that made up the ensemble of the rural school home.
  2. ↑ Living Museum Online: Martin Buber
  3. ^ House under the Rainbow: Remembrance work in Herrlingen
  4. ↑ Ulrich Seemüller: The Jewish old people's home in Herrlingen and the fate of its residents , pp. 12–15
  5. ↑ Ulrich Seemüller: The Jewish retirement home in Herrlingen and the fate of its residents , pp. 15–20
  6. ↑ a b Ulrich Seemüller: Herrlingen in the focus of history
  7. ↑ Ulrich Seemüller: The Jewish old people's home Herrlingen and the fates of its residents , pp. 61-65, and Ulrich Seemüller: Herrlingen in the focus of history
  8. ↑ Ulrich Seemüller: The Jewish old people's home in Herrlingen and the fate of its residents , p. 65