Siegfried Keßler (Pedagogue)

Siegfried Keßler (born June 17, 1883 in Iserlohn ; died 1943 in Auschwitz concentration camp ) was a German educator .

Life

Siegfried Keßler left the Realgymnasium in Iserlohn after the ninth grade and began training as a primary school teacher at the Jewish teachers' seminar of the Marks-Haindorf Foundation in Münster , where he passed the first teacher examination in 1903. He went to the higher girls' school in Hamburg led by Jakob Loewenberg until 1905 and then returned to the Marks Haindorf Foundation, where he worked as a teacher and took the rector's examination in 1911. From 1913 to 1919 he also served as a preacher and cantor for the Jewish community in Münster . During the First World War he was in charge of the prison camps in the region as a military chaplain. With his teaching diploma, he acquired the university entrance qualification and studied German at the University of Münster from 1923 to 1925. His dissertation on Berthold Auerbach , submitted in 1925, did not go to press until 1935.

In 1926 he moved to Munich, where he taught religion, Hebrew and Jewish history at state high schools as a senior teacher. In Munich he put a small play on the Jewish Hanukkah festival in print. After the handover of power to the National Socialists , Keßler took over the management of the Jewish elementary school in Munich in 1935, into which the Ohel-Jakob School was forcibly integrated in 1935 and the Jewish schools, which were rigorously removed from the other Munich schools for racist reasons in 1936/37 by the City School Councilor Josef Bauer Students had to take. When the school closed on July 1, 1942, Keßler was the last Jewish headmaster and teacher in Munich. Keßler and his wife had been ghettoized in the Berg am Laim assembly camp since 1941 , where he was still employed in the self-administration of the Israelite community. Kessler and his wife were on 13 March 1943, the last Jews of Munich and Upper Bavaria to the Theresienstadt ghetto deported and from there to Auschwitz, where lose their tracks. You were declared dead by the Munich District Court in 1965.

Keßler had three children with Selma Weinberg, who was married in 1910. The son Friedrich, who later became Israeli diplomat Shlomo Kaddar , emigrated to Palestine in 1933 , followed by his daughter Henny (* 1911) in 1936 with a tourist visa. Keßler visited her there twice, but returned to Germany each time. The son Karl (* 1918) was arrested during the Reichspogromnacht in 1938 and imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp . He managed to escape to Denmark in 1939 and from there to Sweden in 1943 .

In 1963 the children set up a "Kessler Fund" for the Beth Ischak school in Israel .

Awards

• Iron cross on a white ribbon
• Red Cross Medal (Prussia) III. class

Fonts

• "The mother's dream" - Chamukkaj fairy tale in 1 act. Munich 1928.
• Berthold Auerbach as an educator. Dissertation. University of Münster 1925. Heller, Munich 1935.

literature

• Peter Hanke: On the history of the Jews in Munich between 1933 and 1945. Munich 1968.
• Gisela Möllenhoff and Rita Schlautmann-Overmeyer: Jewish families in Münster 1918 to 1945. Biographical lexicon. Westphalian steam boat, Münster 1995, ISBN 3-929586-48-7 .

Web links

• Works by Siegfried Keßler (Bibliotheca Augustana)
• Siegfried Kessler on the website of the Bavarian Teachers' Association
• Siegfried Kessler at Jewish Writers in Westphalia