Katharina Bayerwaltes

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Katharina Bayerwaltes (born January 20, 1914 , † June 11, 2011 in Bonn ) was a German employee who lived in Bonn. As an advisor to the British town commander, she did valuable work in the reconstruction of the town after the Second World War . She initiated and supervised the twinning between Bonn and Oxford . In 2006 she was honored as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli Yad Vashem Memorial for saving a Jewish family from the Holocaust .

Rescue of the Jacoby family

Salomon and Henriette Jacoby (77 and 72 years old) run the Jacoby department store in Cologne together with their daughter Hildegard Schott . This was Aryanized in 1939 . The Catholic family Heinz and Josephine Odenthal lived in the same house with the Jacoby family .

The Jacoby family was taken to the Müngersdorf assembly camp in 1942 for further deportation to an extermination camp . Hildegard Schott's husband had already been deported. With the help of the Odenthals they managed to escape from the camp. They brought her to the mother of Josephine Odenthal, the 72-year-old Sibylla Cronenberg . This led the Rheinhotel "Zum Anker" in what is now Remagen - Rolandseck near Bonn . Opposite the neighbors there, the Jacobys were passed off as relatives who had lost their house in Cologne in a bomb attack , and the Odenthals would visit their “relatives” to bring food and food stamps .

In May 1943 Sibylla Cronenberg fell ill and had to go to a hospital. The Jacobys were then housed with the 29-year-old Katharina Bayerwaltes in Bonn's Argelanderstraße. Her husband was serving on the Eastern Front as a soldier at the time .

Katharina Bayerwaltes kept the identity of her new roommate secret from everyone, including her husband on home leave .

Bonn, which had hardly been bombed until then, was heavily attacked in the period from October to December 1944. At the time, Katharina Bayerwaltes' husband was on home leave again and decided to take his family out of the danger zone to his parents in Schlegelshaid . The Jacobys stayed in Argelanderstraße and the Odenthal family continued to provide them with food and other essentials in life. Katharina Bayerwaltes worried that her house in Bonn could still be bombed and that the Jacobys would be discovered. So she decided to return in February 1945.

On March 7, 1945, German troops withdrew from Bonn, which was occupied by American troops over the next two days. The Jacoby family was now saved.

The Jacoby family decided not to return to Cologne and moved to Bad Godesberg between Rolandseck and Argelanderstraße. Salomon and Henriette died there in freedom in the months that followed. Her daughter Hildegard was still in contact with her rescuers until her death in 1980.

Appreciation

On May 25, 2005 the following were accepted into the circle of the Righteous Among the Nations :

  • Heinz Odenthal (posthumous)
  • Josephine Odenthal (posthumous)
  • Sibylla Cronenberg (posthumous)
  • Katharina Bayerwaltes

The envoy to the Embassy of the State of Israel , Ilan Mor , presented the award on September 29, 2006 in the old town hall of Bonn.

Life after the war

After the war, Bayerwaltes was the personal assistant to the British city commandant Edward Brown. Here she was involved in the reconstruction of the city of Bonn. She initiated the twinning with the British city of Oxford, one of the very first twinnings after the Second World War, and actively accompanied it throughout her life.

family

Bayerwaltes was married, her husband came from the village of Schlegelshaid in Upper Franconia .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b “Righteous Among the Nations”: Katharina Bayerwaltes is dead , obituary on the website of the city of Bonn from June 17, 2011
  2. ↑ a b Proven civil courage in dark times. Kölnische Rundschau, September 30, 2006, accessed on November 12, 2016 .
  3. ↑ a b Katharina Bayerwaltes on the page of Yad Vashem
  4. ↑ a b Cronenberg FAMILY. Yad Vashem - International Holocaust Memorial, accessed November 12, 2016 .
  5. ^ Jewish life in the community of Oberwinter on the Rhine. Alemannia Judaica - Working Group for Research into Jewish History in Southern Germany and the Adjoining Region, accessed on November 12, 2016 .
  6. ^ Sibylla Cronenberg hid the Jewish Jacoby family. (No longer available online.) Landschaftsverband Rheinland, archived from the original on November 10, 2016 ; accessed on November 12, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.rheinische-geschichte.lvr.de
  7. ↑ a b Jewish families saved with courage and moral courage. (No longer available online.) City of Bonn, October 2, 2006, archived from the original on October 3, 2006 ; accessed on November 12, 2016 .
  8. ^ Bonn - The year 1945. VVN-BdA, accessed on November 12, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Bayerwaltes, Katharina
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Righteous Among the Nations
DATE OF BIRTH January 20, 1914
DATE OF DEATH June 11, 2011
Place of death Bonn