Max Mannheimer

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Max Mannheimer, speech at the liberation ceremony of the Dachau concentration camp on May 5, 2002

Max Mannheimer (born February 6, 1920 in Neutitschein , Czechoslovakia ; died September 23, 2016 in Munich ) was a survivor of the Shoah . Since 1990 he has been the president of the Dachau camp community and since 1995 vice-president of the International Dachau Committee . He worked as a businessman and was active as a writer and painter. Numerous awards and honors honored his diverse commitment to the culture of remembrance of the crimes of National Socialism .

Life

youth

Max Mannheimer comes from a German-Jewish merchant family from Moravia . He grew up as the oldest of the five children of Jakob and Margarethe (née Gelb) Mannheimer in Neutitschein in Czechoslovakia. From 1934 to 1936 he attended the business school in Neutitschein, where he also noticed the first signs of National Socialism. Max Mannheimer got his first job in 1936 in a department store of the J. Schön & Co. company in Znoimo-Starý Šaldorf / Znaim-Alt-Schallersdorf.

Time of the Nazi dictatorship

After Austria's annexation in March 1938, the Mannheimer family took in fled Austrian Jews in their house for one night before they traveled further inland. With the Munich Agreement in September 1938, Neutitschein was incorporated into the German Reich as part of the Reichsgau Sudetenland and the family experienced the first marginalization in the area. Jakob Mannheimer's company car was confiscated a few days later by an employee of the NS-Volkswohlfahrt shop . The father was arrested in the course of the arrests during the November pogroms 1938 and released again in December 1938. He had to leave the part of the country occupied by the German Reich within eight days and fled to Hungarian Brod , the birthplace of his mother. The rest of the family followed on January 27, 1939. After Czechoslovakia was broken up in March 1939, Max Mannheimer took a job in road construction in the summer of 1939, as Jews were only allowed to do physical labor. At the end of 1940 he met Eva Bock. In the hope of being able to stay together in the event of the imminent deportation to the Theresienstadt concentration camp , the two married in September 1942. Mannheimer's brother Erich was arrested in 1942 and taken to the Kaunitz Gestapo dormitory in Brno, which is notorious for its torture methods .

deportation

On January 27, 1943, Mannheimer and his wife, his parents and his siblings Käthe, Ernst and Edgar were deported to Theresienstadt and shortly afterwards transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp , where they arrived on the night of February 1st, 1943. Upon arrival, his parents, his wife and his sister were presumably " sorted out " by the SS as unable to work . Both parents were murdered in the gas chamber on February 2 , his sister murdered on February 25, 1943. Ernst fell ill in the camp and was murdered on March 7, despite information from the brothers Max and Edgar to the block clerk.

Max and Edgar Mannheimer were transported to the Warsaw concentration camp in October 1943 after suffering severe forced labor and illness in Auschwitz. The brothers were forced to clean up the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto, which had been destroyed after the uprising . In the Warsaw concentration camp, Max Mannheimer met Ernest Landau, who gave him some of his soup. In August 1944, the two brothers Max and Edgar survived the transport to the Dachau concentration camp , where many political prisoners such as communists, social democrats and trade unionists were imprisoned. A little later they were transferred from there to the Karlsfeld satellite camp for forced labor. From January 1945 until the evacuation of the camp by the SS on April 28, 1945, the brothers were in the Mühldorf external command . Max and Edgar Mannheimer survived the following so-called " evacuation ", emaciated and sick with typhus until they were liberated by the Americans on April 30, 1945 in Tutzing .

After the liberation

After his release from the hospital , he returned to his home town of Neutitschein. He vowed never to step on German soil again. Shortly afterwards, however, he fell in love with the German Elfriede Eiselt, a resistance fighter who became his second wife. They moved to Munich with their daughter Eva in 1946. Until 1964, Max Mannheimer was involved in various Jewish aid organizations. When his second wife died of cancer in 1964, Mannheimer wrote down his life story. Originally only his daughter was supposed to see the text. With his third wife, the American Grace Franzen b. Cheney, whom he married in 1965, he had his son Ernst. Mannheimer worked as a businessman in Munich, most recently as managing director of a leather goods trade until his retirement.

Mannheimer began painting in the 1950s and signed with the name ben jakov (son of Jakobs) to honor his father. In 1975, 1995, 2001 and 2015 his works were exhibited in Munich, 1977 in Zurich, 1992 in his native town Nový Jičín and 2000 and 2010 in Dachau. In the catalog of the exhibition from 2010 it says about Mannheimer: He paints for himself, for the act of creating the pictures. The works “are also pictures of a path out of pain and depression”.

In December 1993 his brother Edgar Mannheimer died in Zurich, where he lived as a gallery owner . Max Mannheimer lived in Haar near Munich.

Max Mannheimer died on September 23, 2016 at the age of 96 and was buried in the New Israelite Cemetery in Garchinger Strasse in Munich- Freimann .

Remembering the Holocaust

In January 1956 Mannheimer worked on a project for the Vienna Library in London and reported on his experiences during National Socialism. Transcripts of the interview are stored in the library in London, in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and in the archive of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial. In 1976 the records from 1964 came to the archive in Dachau, where they were found in spring 1985 when the first edition of the Dachauer Hefte was being prepared. The then director of the memorial, Barbara Distel, and the historian Wolfgang Benz , at that time working at the Munich Institute for Contemporary History , went to Mannheimer and asked him to approve the text for the first issue of the scientific journal. When it was published in 1985 (published in full under the title Late Diary in 2000 ), Mannheimer became an important contemporary witness . He campaigned for democracy and against right-wing extremism .

In 1986 the Protestant pastor Waldemar Pisarski invited Mannheimer to report on his life in the Dachau Reconciliation Church. That was the beginning of Mannheimer's lecture activities about his experiences in the concentration camp, with which he wanted to educate young people and adults (e.g. in schools and in the armed forces) about the horrors of the Third Reich and the concentration camps and to prevent a repetition. Mannheimer about his lectures: "I come to schools as a witness of that time, not as a judge or prosecutor."

From 1988 Mannheimer was chairman of the Dachau camp community . He was also a member of the advisory board of the Association Against Forgetting - For Democracy .

On August 20, 2013, Chancellor Angela Merkel accepted an invitation from Max Mannheimer to visit the Dachau concentration camp memorial , which none of her predecessors had done before.

On January 27, 2015, Mannheimer gave the commemorative speech in the Bavarian state parliament on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp. At the celebration of his 95th birthday on February 8, 2015, he and the director Gabriele Hammermann received the then US Vice President Joe Biden on his private visit to the concentration camp memorial.

Mannheimer had been a member of the SPD since autumn 1946 . His wife Elfriede, also a member of the SPD, was a member of the Munich city council from 1952 to 1960 . Through his wife he had contact with many Sudeten German social democrats. A newspaper portrait pointed out that after the end of the war he initially dealt almost exclusively with Jews and Social Democrats. For example, he had been on friendly terms with the former Mayor of Munich Hans-Jochen Vogel (SPD) for years. In 1995 he accompanied the then SPD chairman Rudolf Scharping to Israel at his request.

honors and awards

Max Mannheimer (2014)

In 1993 Mannheimer was knight of the Legion of Honor of the French Republic.

Mannheimer was awarded the Waldemar von Knoeringen Prize in 1994 by the Georg von Vollmar Academy , which is close to the SPD and which the Academy awards every two years to outstanding personalities who stand in the tradition of the workers' movement and the goals of democratic socialism .

In 2000 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich .

In 2005 he received the Upper Bavarian Culture Prize .

He was also awarded the Bavarian Order of Merit and the Bavarian Constitutional Medal in silver and gold.

In 2008 he was awarded the Wilhelm Hoegner Prize of the BayernSPD parliamentary group.

In 2009 he received honorary citizenship in his home town of Neutitschein.

In 2010 he became an honorary member of the Israelite religious community in Munich . The education area of ​​the Dachau youth hostel was renamed the Max Mannheimer Study Center in his honor . The official naming took place on July 29, 2010.

In 2011 he was awarded honorary citizenship of the city of Dachau.

On May 26, 2012 he received the European Charlemagne Prize of the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft and on September 12, 2012 the Great Cross of Merit with Star of the Federal Republic of Germany, presented by the Bavarian Prime Minister Horst Seehofer .

In 2015 Mannheimer was awarded the medal for special services to Bavaria in a United Europe .

In 2017, Max-Mannheimer-Straße in Bad Aibling and Max-Mannheimer-Platz in Dachau were inaugurated.

On January 20, 2018, the municipality of Poing in the district of Ebersberg renamed its parish hall to Max-Mannheimer-Haus. Mannheimer was stuck in a death train from Dachau concentration camp south in Poing station in April 1945; only because of a previous injury did he avoid a prison guards massacre.

January 25, 2018, the middle school at St. Severin Street in is Garching in the Government of Upper Bavaria officially as Max Mannheimer Middle School Garching b. Munich led.

From January 27 to February 11, 2018, the art association, the adult education center and the city library in Bad Aibling organized the Max Mannheimer Culture Days for the first time , which have taken place annually since then.

On February 6, 2018, Mannheimer's 98th birthday, the square in front of the NS Documentation Center on Munich's Brienner Strasse was named after Mannheimer; the center was given the address Max-Mannheimer-Platz 1.

The Max-Mannheimer-Gymnasium Grafing has had his name since January 2020 .

Several of Mannheimer's paintings can be seen from March 2020 to January 2021 in the special exhibition "The Art of a Contemporary Witness - On the 100th Birthday of Max Mannheimer" in the Museum Mühldorf. They are on loan from the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site.

Works

literature

  • Ilse Macek and Horst Schmidt (eds.): Max Mannheimer - Survivor, Artist, Life Artist . Volk Verlag, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-86222-012-0 .

Movies

Web links

Commons : Max Mannheimer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. ↑ Holocaust eyewitness: Max Mannheimer is dead. In: Spiegel Online. Retrieved September 24, 2016 .
  2. ↑ a b c Friedhelm Boll: speaking as burden and liberation. Holocaust survivors and politically persecuted victims of two dictatorships. A contribution to the German-German culture of remembrance (=  publications by the Institute for Social History ). Study edition, Dietz, Bonn 2003, ISBN 3-8012-4130-0 , p. 83.
  3. ↑ Late diary. P. 10.
  4. ↑ Late diary. P. 19.
  5. ↑ Late diary. P. 20.
  6. ↑ Late diary. P. 22.
  7. ↑ Late diary. P. 24.
  8. ↑ Late diary. Pp. 27-34.
  9. ↑ Late diary. P. 44.
  10. ↑ Jakob Leib Mannheimer, b. May 24, 1888 Myslenice (Galicia), Margarethe (Markéta) b. Yellow, born April 4, 1893, Ernst Mannheimer, b. December 10, 1923 and Käthe Mannheimer, b. January 13, 1921. The brother Erich, b. May 15, 1921, does not appear on this transport list, but only under the spelling “Erich Manheimer” in the death books of the Auschwitz concentration camp. His brother Ernst had already been arrested by the Gestapo at the end of 1942 because he had passed on the address of a smuggler to emigrate to Palestine. State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau (ed.): Auschwitz death books: fragments. Volume 3: List of names M – Z. Munich / New Providence / London et al. 1995, ISBN 3-598-11275-0 , p. 774; Late diary. P. 44.
  11. ↑ Late diary. P. 48.
  12. ↑ Käthe M. appears in the Auschwitz death books; her parents were murdered immediately and therefore never registered in the camp. State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau (ed.): Auschwitz death books: fragments. Volume 3: List of names M – Z. Munich / New Providence / London et al. 1995, p. 775.
  13. ↑ Late diary. P. 72.
  14. ^ A b c Max Mannheimer: Late Diary [Electronic Resource]. Theresienstadt - Auschwitz - Warsaw - Dachau . Piper ebooks, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-492-97081-5 , o. P.
  15. ↑ a b c d Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial (ed.): Max Mannheimer - Ben Jakov . Dachau 2010, pp. 44–45.
  16. ↑ Rita Baedeker: The marriage of colors. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . April 13, 2016.
  17. ^ From the foreword by Wolfgang Benz in the expanded paperback edition by Max Mannheimer: Spätes Tagebuch . Piper, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-492-26386-3 , p. 10.
  18. ^ David Friedman: Burial in Munich: Farewell to Max Mannheimer. In: Bayerischer Rundfunk . September 27, 2016.
  19. ↑ knerger.de: The grave of Max Mannheimer
  20. ^ Max Mannheimer: Theresienstadt - Auschwitz - Warsaw - Dachau. Memories. In: Dachauer Hefte. 1, 1985, pp. 88-128.
  21. ↑ Max Mannheimer is dead. In: Jüdische Allgemeine. September 25, 2016. Retrieved October 4, 2016 .
  22. ↑ Jörg Böckem : Unlike Caesar or Napoleon, you can book me. In: The time . March 31, 2010.
  23. ↑ Björn Hengst: Silent Remembrance in the Campaign Fire. In: Spiegel Online . August 20, 2013.
  24. ↑ Landtag recalls Nazi victims - Max Mannheimer criticizes Pegida. In: evening newspaper . January 27, 2015.
  25. ↑ A little Berlin. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . February 8, 2015.
  26. ↑ Max Mannheimer warns of Pegida. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . December 4, 2015, accessed December 9, 2015 .
  27. ↑ Helmut Zeller: Memories of the last witness. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . December 13, 2012.
  28. ↑ Miryam Gümbel: Thanks to the friend. In: Jüdische Allgemeine . 3rd July 2014.
  29. ↑ Miryam Gümbel: Moral Instances . In: Jüdische Allgemeine . July 31, 2008.
  30. ↑ Melanie Staudinger: "Max Mannheimer is a role model" In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . March 14, 2011.
  31. ↑ Late honor. The man who can't hate . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . May 12, 2011. Retrieved August 10, 2017.
  32. ↑ Max Mannheimer awarded the Federal Cross of Merit. In: Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung . September 12, 2012.
  33. ↑ Ellen Presser: A city remembers - Bad Aibling names a street after the contemporary witness and reconciler. In: Jüdische Allgemeine. August 10, 2017. Retrieved August 18, 2017 .
  34. ↑ Helmut Zeller: The Voice of Truth. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. September 20, 2017. Retrieved September 20, 2017 .
  35. ↑ sueddeutsche.de: Poing names his community center after Max Mannheimer , January 21, 2018
  36. ↑ Upper Bavarian Official Gazette 03/2018. (PDF) Government of Upper Bavaria, February 9, 2018, accessed on February 2, 2020 .
  37. ↑ Upper Bavarian Official Gazette 05/2018. (PDF) Government of Upper Bavaria, March 9, 2018, accessed on February 2, 2020 .
  38. ↑ Against forgetting. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. January 24, 2018, accessed February 6, 2018 .
  39. ↑ Jakob Wetzel: The Nazi Documentation Center is now on Max-Mannheimer-Platz. Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 7, 2018, accessed on February 7, 2018 .
  40. ↑ Munich names Platz after Max Mannheimer. Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt (Bavaria) , accessed on February 7, 2018 .
  41. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung: Grafinger Gymnasium is named after Max Mannheimer , November 7, 2019 , accessed on November 8, 2019.
  42. ^ Grafing grammar school is named after Max Mannheimer. November 7, 2019, accessed November 8, 2019 .
  43. ↑ see The Art of a Contemporary Witness - March 12, 2020 to January 15, 2021 page of the History Center and Museum Mühldorf am Inn, accessed June 7, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Mannheimer, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH February 6, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Neutitschein , Czechoslovakia
DATE OF DEATH 23rd September 2016
Place of death Munich