Synagogue on the Lappenberg

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The synagogue on the Lappenberg on a picture postcard (before 1910)

The synagogue on Lappenberg was the synagogue of the Jewish community in Hildesheim from its construction in 1848/49 until it was destroyed during the November pogroms in 1938 .

Prehistory and edification

Because it was not allowed to build a synagogue, the congregation used a rear building on the Lappenberg for worship purposes for more than two hundred years. This building, located behind the preserved Jewish schoolhouse, was supposed to be closed by the building authorities in 1839 due to the danger of collapse , after it had been dilapidated since the beginning of the century . Because there was no alternative, it was used until the 1840s, when the chapel of the Evangelical Lutheran orphanage was only allowed to be used.

In 1832 the community applied for a new building permit for a synagogue through its head, the money changer Freudenthal, and asked to let it have part of the Lappenberg, which belongs to the city. The magistrate then decided in January 1833 to lease 15 square rods (approx. 300 m²) on the Lappenberg to the Jewish community for low interest . Since the magistrate first wanted floor plans and cost estimates to be available before approving the public collection of donations requested by the community , but the community could not agree on a draft for a long time, the process dragged on for over 15 years. In 1840 the magistrate permitted the collection in advance, but this could only be carried out when the required documents had been submitted. In 1841 the municipality rejected the design by a Hildesheim architect , in 1843 that of a Hanoverian building inspector and another, created at the request of the magistrate, which provided for a rotunda .

It was not until 1848 that a design by the Hanoverian building inspector Eduard Ferdinand Schwarz received "decisive applause" from the community, which envisaged an octagonal building. The question referred by the municipality calculation went from construction costs of 10,800 Reichstalern of which about 1,300 Reichstaler should be funded through donations; The community had already saved 3500 Reichstaler. Numerous citizens, including many goyim , donated for the new building, and many Christians even gave demonstratively. A list of donors and their contributions has been preserved, but the building plans and earlier drafts are not. After the city council had also accepted the plans, construction work probably began in July of the same year.

The new synagogue was completed at the beginning of November 1849. The inauguration was celebrated on November 8, 1849 with a festive service, at which the land rabbi Meyer Landsberg, father of the civil engineer Theodor Landsberg , gave the sermon and about which the local press reported in detail.

history

In 1858 land rabbi Landsberg issued a synagogue order for Hildesheim. In the following years, many sermons given here were printed. In 1881 the municipality was able to replace the long-term lease, and the property has also belonged to it since then.

destruction

In the course of the November pogroms in 1938, the Hildesheim synagogue was also destroyed. After that, in 1940 the community was forced to sell the property back to the city.

Arson by the Hildesheim SS storm

The work of destruction began with arson by the Hildesheim SS storm under SS Sturmbannführer Emil Frels.

Frels should urgently call the office of the SS section Hanover during the commemoration of the Hitler putsch at the Bismarck tower on the Galgenberg . The celebration began around midnight on November 9, 1938. Frels found out about this from the landlord of the “Altdeutsches Haus” restaurant on the corner of Jacobi and Osterstrasse near the Old Town market square, which was the hangout of the Hildesheim storm. According to his own statement, Frels saw the landlord named Francke gesturing during the celebration, but waited for the celebration to end because he was not allowed to leave before. After receiving the message, he drove with his adjutant , Oberscharführer Zander, to the "Altdeutsche Hof" to make a phone call; Since the corresponding celebration in Munich , which was followed by radio in Hildesheim , ended around 1:00 a.m. on November 10th, the time can be classified accordingly. During this telephone call the leader of the SS section, SS-Oberführer Kurt Benson , first asked him whether there was a synagogue in Hildesheim and then ordered him to destroy it. Benson reprimanded the late call, saying that synagogues were already burning across the empire. Frels should report execution within an hour. Frels then initially considered blowing up the synagogue with Zander, but then decided to destroy it by fire. When the Sturmbann arrived, Frels called off the evening of camaraderie that had actually been planned, sent the foreign storms home, ordered the Hildesheim storm into the restaurant alone, forbade his people to leave the same and posted a guard in front of the door. He then delegated to Zander the task of putting together a squad of ten to fifteen men to procure gas cans and use them to set the synagogue on fire.

This group then moved away, Frels initially stayed in the restaurant with the rest of the storm and called the head of the municipal fire brigade , Oberbrandmeister Marhauer, by telephone, informed him of the destruction order and instructed him that the fire brigade should be on the move Allow time and limit the fire fighting to preventing the fire from spreading to the adjacent half-timbered houses , which are highly endangered by flying sparks . According to Marhauer, he immediately returned to the fire station and gave the alarm, but did not set a fire brigade in motion until about half an hour later when the fire alarm that Frels had announced to him was received, but against his orders without artificial delay.

There are various but not mutually exclusive testimonies about the arson itself. Several witnesses testified that SS men tore off the bars on the synagogue windows and threw objects into the building, causing flames to flare up.

Another witness stated:

“Later I heard from the synagogue servant Kosminski [!], Who lived in the Jewish school at the synagogue, that some SS men came to his apartment before the fire and asked for the key to the synagogue. He wanted to go to the synagogue himself, but this was prevented, as he told me, by being pushed into his house and the door being locked from the outside. "

A woman named Ruth Bandel reported:

“SS men got my father out of bed in the middle of the night and ordered him to unlock the synagogue, but wait in front of the door. After a while the men came back and the prayer leader had to lock the synagogue. A short time later the building was on fire. "

After Zander reported the execution, Frels went to the crime scene with the rest of his people, who supposedly nobody knew what it was about. When they arrived, the church was already burning inside. The SS storm now immediately blocked the access roads so that the fire brigade could not get as far as the synagogue, so it was not possible for them to protect the neighboring houses either. The residents were ordered to stay in their houses and to keep the doors and windows closed - this meant mortal danger, especially for the residents of the half-timbered houses just a few meters from the east side of the burning church on the other side of the street. The fire brigade was also held up on Wollenweberstrasse by a "civilian" - probably a Gestapo officer in civilian clothes - who, according to Marhauer, replied to the question he asked what he was doing, that the fire brigade still had time, which Marhauer did wants to have disregarded. Around 2 a.m. the whole building was on fire.

Final destruction

As a private photograph of the east side taken on the morning of November 10, 1938 shows, the south-east walls were still standing at this point in time. In a photo taken later, however, these have also collapsed. According to several witnesses, the technical emergency service first tried to blow up the ruins, but stopped the attempts because of the endangerment of the surrounding houses. Finally, members of the technical emergency service, supported by forced prisoners from the nearby Godehardo prison, pushed in the remains of the wall with long wooden beams from the outside in an anti-clockwise direction; this is evidenced by further photographs taken by an SA man living in the immediate vicinity . Because there was a lack of workers and vehicles, in Hildesheim, unlike in other German cities, the rubble was left behind for a very long time. It was not until the Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung of June 14, 1940 that the fire had been completely cleared, under the heading, Restoring order on the Lappenberg .

Judicial processing of the destruction

The destruction of the synagogue was the subject of legal proceedings at the end of the 1940s, in which, however, it was not possible to determine who belonged to the group of actual arsonists under Zander's command and according to which criteria they made their selection.

Memory of the synagogue

Memorial stone from 1948

The inscription on the memorial stone from 1947

As early as 1947, the city council of Hildesheim decided to erect a memorial stone and approved 3,600 Reichsmarks for it , but rejected the request of a social democratic councilor to appeal to the population for donations. On February 22, 1948, the inauguration took place in the presence of delegates from seven newly founded Jewish communities from Northern Germany and local church and trade union representatives, but with little participation of the population. The stone bears the inscription in Hebrew , German and English

"At this point stood the synagogue that was destroyed by wicked hands on November 9, 1938."

After 1948, it was not until November 1978 that the mayor and the city director laid a wreath there again, and the event again met with little interest from the population.

Creation of the synagogue memorial

In 1984 the Board of Trustees of the Friedrich Weinhagen Foundation decided to erect a memorial in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the destruction of the synagogue. The existing memorial stone on the southern tip of the Lappenberg Island was to be retained. In the summer of 1986, the foundation asked various artists, specifying a cost limit, for idea sketches that were also allowed to deviate from the foundation's own ideas previously developed. The design by the Cologne sculptor Elmar Hillebrand was ultimately selected . At his suggestion, the authors of the other three drafts - Theo Heiermann and Jochem Pechau from Cologne and Karl Matthäus Winter from Limburg - were involved in the implementation of his overall draft in order to be able to complete the work by the planned inauguration, with the tasks being distributed by lot . Theological and historical advisor was Pinchas Lapide . The space around the actual memorial was designed by Dieter Bösenberg from Hildesheim .

Description of the memorial

Synagogue memorial
The southern tip of the Lappenberginsel today. In the lower left corner of the picture the 1947 memorial stone

The memorial stands at the point where the center of the octagonal main room was. The basic shape is a cuboid made of Verona red , a dense reddish limestone from near Verona . The base is made of bronze . Stars of David are inlaid on the sides of the cuboid , the one on the west side is also made of bronze, the rest of different types of marble . Each page has its own topic. The east side deals with election, the north side with the cult, the south side with the law of the Jewish people, the west side with its persecution and the Shoah . There is a gargoyle on each side and a catch basin on the base. A miniature of the city of Jerusalem , carried by four lions, rises up from the cube as a bronze sculpture . The width of the stone is 2 m, its height up to 2.45 m. The base protrudes a little so that its edge length is 2.40. The plastic on the top is 75 cm high and wide. The total height is 3.48 m, the total weight approx. 22 t.

Notice board on the surrounding wall

The immediate vicinity of the cuboid is paved with old cobblestones from Hildesheimer streets made of brown and gray granite , the remaining southern tip of the Lappenberginsel is overgrown with grass. The square is reached via a granite staircase on the west side, which was built on the spot where the stairs leading to the entrance to the synagogue's vestibule were. As a boundary, a natural stone wall was built on the foundations exposed in 1988 , which traces the course of part of the outer wall of the church.

Desecration of the memorial

On the night of November 8th to 9th, 2005, the memorial was showered with red paint by strangers shortly before the commemoration to commemorate the November pogroms.

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Heutger: Juden in Hildesheim, 1984, p. 76.
  2. ↑ For the entire paragraph cf. Herbert Reyer : The "building of a new synagogue" on Lappenberg. The building was inaugurated 150 years ago (= historical documents from the city archive. No. 36). In: From home. Local supplement of the Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung from November 6, 1999 (PDF).
  3. ^ A b Herbert Reyer: The "Building of a New Synagogue" on Lappenberg, 1999.
  4. ↑ a b c d Hildesheim under National Socialism. Aspects of the city's history. History workshop of the University of Hanover , accessed on December 10, 2007.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Jörg Schneider: The Jewish community in Hildesheim from 1871–1942. Dissertation from the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen , 1999.
  6. ↑ Jörg Schneider speaks of ten, the learning workshop history of ten to fifteen men.
  7. ↑ Heutger: Juden in Hildesheim, 1984, p. 78.
  8. ↑ a b The synagogue burned at 2 o'clock. Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung, November 10, 2006 ( Memento from August 3, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ). Augustine press review .
  9. ↑ For the whole paragraph: Klaus Neumann: Reflections on German memorial culture. Perpetrators, victims, followers: public remembrance in Germany ( Memento from May 17, 2006 in the Internet Archive ). Lecture at Wiesbaden Town Hall on April 19, 2006, organized by the Active Museum Spiegelgasse , Wiesbaden.
  10. ^ Siemer: The memorial for the synagogue on Lappenberg in Hildesheim, 1989, p. 9.
  11. ↑ Siemer: The memorial for the synagogue on Lappenberg in Hildesheim, 1989, p. 11 ff.
  12. ↑ a b Siemer: The memorial for the synagogue on Lappenberg in Hildesheim, 1989, p. 13 ff.
  13. ↑ For the entire section: Siemer: The memorial for the synagogue on Lappenberg in Hildesheim, 1989, p. 14 ff.
  14. ^ Unknown people vilify the Jewish monument on the Lappenberg. Radio Tonkuhle , November 9, 2005.
  15. ^ Anti-Semitic color attack in Hildesheim ( Memento from August 27, 2017 in the Internet Archive ). Indymedia on November 10, 2005.

Web links

Commons : Synagogue Memorial Hildesheim  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 52 ° 8 ′ 45.6 ″  N , 9 ° 57 ′ 6.1 ″  E