Jewish life in Stolberg (Rhineland)
Jewish life in Stolberg only slowly developed into a small community in the course of the 19th century, which was completely wiped out by the Holocaust. The most visible evidence of Jewish life in today's urban area is the Jewish cemetery at the dry pond .
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Overview of the development of the Jewish population
- 1808: 25 people (7 men, 6 women, 5 girls, 7 boys)
- 1824: 12 people (8 men, 4 women)
- 1850: 6 people
- 1890: 54 people (28 men, 26 women)
- 1900: 86 people (48 men, 38 women)
- 1905: 57 people (28 men, 29 women)
- 1933: 76 people
Grow into a church
Only in the course of the 19th century slowly came Jews to Stolberg, some as administrative employees of the expanding industry. But they preferred to avoid the place as a place of residence because of the environmental pollution from the copper yards . In addition, Jews also settled in Stolberg as retailers, some of them as butchers. After negotiations with the Catholic parish of St. Lucia , a Jewish cemetery was established in 1860 at the dry pond (“Im Turmblick”) . A prayer room was set up behind Steinweg 78 (today there are garages here). After the First World War, persecuted Eastern Jews also came to Stolberg.
Persecution, escape and deportation
The Jewish cemetery at the dry pond was desecrated as early as 1925. The city council then had the walls raised.
In Stolberg, too, the SA tried to ensure compliance with the boycott of Jews on April 1, 1933. In the period that followed, harassment and humiliation drove most of the Jewish residents, such as the well-known textile merchant Berthold Wolff , into emigration, whereby they usually had to sell their property well below value in order to be able to pay for the exit papers. During the Reichspogromnacht on November 9, 1938, the SA and SS that had gathered at the Alter Markt devastated the two remaining Jewish shops in Stolberg (the shoe shops owned by Bernhard Wächter and Sigmund Zinader). As a result, a municipal order forbade Jews to visit the public baths and public library and to use public park benches. The prayer room behind the house at Steinweg 78 was closed at the beginning of 1939 (due to a lack of demand, as officially argued). The Jewish community in Stolberg dissolved completely through flight and persecution.
Two non-Jewish men saved their Jewish wives' lives because they did not divorce (Hubert Faber, married to Amalia Faber, née Breuer, died September 24, 1959, and Bock, married to Else Bock, née Randerath). After the ration cards were withdrawn in 1942, people from Stolberg such as Ludwig Lude also provided for them . There is evidence that at least 19 Stolberg Jews were murdered during the Nazi era or disappeared in the vicinity of the extermination camps in the east.
In November 1941, the Gestapo set up a camp for 121 Jewish forced laborers on the premises of Kali Chemie AG on Rhenaniastraße , who until June 1942 had to do 12 hours a day of forced labor in the neighboring factories and were subjected to harassment by the supervisors.
For a short time in the summer of 1942 there was a transit camp in RAD barracks in Mausbach , in which around 300 Jews were held under inhuman conditions before their deportation.
Commemoration
In front of the former prayer room of the Jewish community in Steinweg, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the November pogroms of 1938, a memorial plaque was embedded in the floor. A green area on Rhenaniastraße was renamed Berthold-Wolff -Park in memory of the Jewish textile merchant of the same name .
At the corner of Rhenaniastrasse and Münsterbachstrasse, a memorial stone with a Star of David was inaugurated in Berthold-Wolff-Park , which commemorates the camp on Rhenaniastrasse and particularly mentions the Jewish slave laborers.
On January 20, 2001, a memorial in the form of a swastika forged from barbed wire was inaugurated on the site of the former Zinkhütter Hof to commemorate the victims of National Socialism. It was forged by the blacksmith Matthias Peters on the initiative of former SPD councilor Matthias Breuer and financed by donations from private individuals and companies. At the time of its inauguration, the use of a swastika as a symbol of the perpetrators was disputed nationwide. On this occasion , Paul Spiegel traveled to Stolberg and met with the then mayor Siebertz (CDU). The purpose of the memorial was specified by an inscription plaque.
Jewish cemeteries
The Jewish cemetery at the Bayerhaus today belongs to the city of Aachen, district Eilendorf.
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The most visible evidence of (earlier) Jewish life in today's urban area is the Jewish cemetery at the dry pond with graves from the 19th and 20th centuries, some with Hebrew inscriptions. There is a menorah in front of him . Here are the graves of Berthold Wolff (1949) and Amalia Faber, b. Breuer, (died September 24, 1959). It was the last burial in the Jewish cemetery "Trockener Weiher".
Jews lived in Stolberg as early as the 17th century and were able to bury their deceased in a special part of the Catholic cemetery next to the castle chapel. This Jewish part of the cemetery was separated from the Catholic part by a wall on three sides. The fourth side bordered a footpath. In 1852 - after 200 years of peaceful coexistence - the Catholic parish of St. Luzia intended to expand its cemetery and applied to the Stolberg city administration to close the Jewish cemetery. After a transition period, this property was to be incorporated into the Catholic cemetery. The Jewish community, which at that time consisted of 17 people, was offered a plot of the same size on the “Dry Pond” in exchange to create a cemetery there. After long negotiations, the majority of the Jewish community agreed to the property swap in 1859. With the approval of the church authorities and the royal government, the new Jewish cemetery was laid out in 1860. The cemetery area was set up at the expense of the parish of St. Luzia and provided with a hedge. It is not known whether the deceased were reburied or gravestones were moved.
Jewish life today
Reliable figures on the Jewish population in today's Stolberg are not available. The next synagogue is in Aachen .
Remarks
- ↑ Fixed name of the Jewish citizens 1808 for the Mairie Stolberg / Rhineland; see family book Euregio - historical lists
literature
- Manfred Bierganz : The story of suffering of the Jews in Stolberg during the Nazi era. Stolberg 1989
- Group Z (editor): "Moved to Auschwitz". Stations of Nazi terror, persecution and resistance in the “Third Reich” , 2nd expanded edition, Stolberg 2011