Overall, Jewish life in Germany has been able to take root again: synagogues have been rebuilt or restored in many towns, sometimes on the sites of synagogues destroyed in 1938. If the properties were overbuilt, synagogues were built elsewhere and memorial plaques were erected in their former places.

To document Jewish life as an important part of European cultural and intellectual history, for example, Jewish museums and documentation sites were built in Frankfurt am Main, Munich, Cologne, Berlin and elsewhere. In the past 70 years, institutes for the study of Judaism and Jewish life have been established in Frankfurt am Main, Potsdam, Berlin and elsewhere. In Heidelberg, the Central Council of Jews in Germany founded the private University of Jewish Studies with state recognition in 1979. In addition, Prof. Manfred Koob of Darmstadt Technical University, a native of Heppenheim, has used modern CAD simulation to create visual representations of synagogues destroyed in 1938. In the meantime, in addition to religious and cultural institutions, Jewish restaurants or stores with kosher offerings can be found in cities and communities – again, Jewish holidays are celebrated and there are Jewish sports clubs.

It seems almost natural, but it is only almost: because recently men were attacked on the open street just because they wear a kippa on their head; a right-wing extremist party representative calls the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a „stigma of German history“ and new anti-Semitism has led to the 2019 attack on the synagogue in Halle.

Captions
Fig. 4: Logo of the University of Jewish Studies with state recognition in Heidelberg.
(Source: Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies)
Fig. 5: 3-D reconstruction of the main synagogue in Mannheim, built in 1885 and destroyed in 1938,
entrance facade (source: Architectura Virtualis GmbH, cooperation of the Technical
University of Darmstadt, Dr.-Ing. Marc Grellert)
Fig. 6: 3-D reconstruction of the main synagogue in Mannheim, built in 1885 and destroyed in 1938,
View from the entrance into the men’s room (Source: Architectura Virtualis GmbH, Cooperation of the Technical University of Darmstadt, Dr.-Ing. Marc Grellert)

The Nazi terror had wiped out centuries of Jewish life in Germany in just 12 years between 1933 and 1945. After the surrender of the German Reich on May 8, 1945, some Jews returned from exile to help re-educate Germans and build a democratic, free state. They were active in interrogating German prisoners of war, in radio broadcasting, or in the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Other Jews returned to Germany, but mostly only temporarily until they left for the new state of Israel.

In addition to the approximately 15,000 Jews living in Germany in 1950, there were about 200,000 Jews who, as former forced laborers from Eastern Europe, were unable to return to their homeland during the emerging Cold War. Some of them stayed here or emigrated to Israel. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many mostly Orthodox Jews from the former Soviet republics came to Germany. At the beginning of the 21st century, there are about 230,000 Jews living in 105 communities.

In the summer of 1945, a Central Committee of the liberated Jews in the American zone was formed to represent their interests. On July 19, 1950, this committee joined with other committees to form the new Central Council of Jews in Germany. This council had to deal with various topics and problems: in the founding years of the Federal Republic of Germany, questions of reparations had to be introduced into the legislative process and the criminal and historical-political reappraisal of the Nazi era had to be demanded in view of new right-wing extremist parties and renewed anti-Semitism in the 1960s/70s.

Captions
Fig. 1: David Ben Gurion reading the Declaration of Independence of Israel on May 15, 1948 (Source: Flickr – Government Press Office (GPO) – David Ben Gurion reading the Declaration of Independence, Government Press Office (Israel), via Wikimedia Commons).
Fig. 2: New Synagogue Darmstadt (Source: Stadtarchiv Darmstadt, Photo Roland Koch)
Fig. 3: Former synagogue in Pfungstadt (Source: Former synagogue Pfungstadt, Commander-pirx, via Wikimedia Commons)

After World War II, the Allies set up an International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg between 1945 and 1949 for a trial of the main war criminals or those mainly responsible for the Nazi regime. The German population also took note of this. They saw in newsreels how Göring, Speer, Rosenberg, Hess, Keitel and others brazenly rejected their responsibility with a „Not guilty!“.

Most of the defendants were found guilty by the court and mostly sentenced to death by hanging. Other defendants received prison sentences, including Heinz Jost, a native of Lorsch. An SS brigade leader and SD Einsatzgruppenführer, Jost was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1948 for participating in executions of Jews, but the sentence was reduced to a ten-year sentence only three years later. He was released from prison after only one year.

Thirteen years after the Nuremberg Trials, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had taken over the organization of the Holocaust in the East after the „Wannsee Conference“ and whom the Israeli foreign intelligence service Mossad had tracked down in Buenos Aires, took place in Jerusalem in 1961. Eichmann was sentenced to death on December 15, 1961, and executed on June 1, 1962.

After a heated discussion in the Federal Republic of Germany around 1960 about the so-called „Schlussstrichfrage,“ a trial on National Socialist perpetration was opened for the first time in a German court on December 20, 1963, with the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt am Main, despite deliberate delays. The course of the trial was recorded in minutes, but also in tape recordings. It attracted a great deal of attention among the general public, but also among a senior class of the Old Electoral High School in Bensheim. The school class attended the trial on March 25, 1965. The impressions of the then 18-year-olds were reflected in an article in their school newspaper (Kurfürst).

The first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt became a landmark in the prosecution of Nazi crimes in the death camps. Although this coming to terms with Nazi terror was soon accompanied by inflammatory writings by Holocaust deniers in the 1970s, crimes committed in the extermination camps of Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and others could be prosecuted and punished under the rule of law. A change in society’s attitude toward responsibly coming to terms with the past and remembrance policies, as well as the decision of the German Bundestag to lift the statute of limitations for murder, have laid an essential foundation for this.

Captions
Fig. 1: Main war crimes trial in Nuremberg (Source: Nuremberg Trials. Looking down on defendants dock, circa 1945-1946. – NARA – 540127, National Archivesat College Park, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).
Fig. 2: The trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 at the District Court in Jerusalem (the defendant left in glass case), (Source: Adolf Eichmann is sentenced to death at the conclusion of the Eichmann Trial USHMM 65289, Israeli GPO photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Fig. 3: First Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in 1965 in the specially equipped Haus Gallus in Frankfurt am Main (Source: bpk media number: 70243319, Photographer: Abisag Tüllmann, Dated: 03.04.1964, Geographical reference: Location: Frankfurt am Main / Germany)
Fig. 4: Observations of a senior class of the Altes Kurfürstliches Gymnasium (Old Electoral High School) in Bensheim, which spent a day as audience members at the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial on March 25, 1965; report by Joachim-Felix Leonhard for the school newspaper „Kurfürst“ in 1966.

Before that, in 1938, the Nazi rulers had occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia and now persecuted the Jews there as well, driving many into exile or deporting them to extermination camps. With the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the extermination work of the Wehrmacht and SS units expanded against many Eastern European Jewish communities that had been settled in shtetls or ghettos for centuries.

A little more than two years later, at the so-called „Wannsee Conference“ on January 20, 1942, the „Final Solution of the Jewish Question“ and thus the industrial mass killing by gassing, poisoning, shooting and burning in extermination camps in the East was decided. Until shortly before the end of the war in 1945, about 6 million Jews, about 500,000 Sinti and Roma and many other prisoners were murdered.
Few had survived when the Red Army opened the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp on January 27, 1945, and the British Army opened the gates of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945. They liberated starving people and gave testimony to the world public of the genocide committed in the German name.

After the surrender of the German Reich on May 8, 1945, the victorious Allied powers – the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain and France – quickly began the search for the war criminals. At the same time, they also took the first step toward a re-education for a postwar development of Germany oriented toward freedom and democracy. They were unable to apprehend all of the Holocaust’s henchmen and bring them all to justice: some, such as Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler, had cowardly evaded responsibility by committing suicide, others went into hiding and were only later discovered and brought to justice – and still others, such as the notorious SS camp doctor at Auschwitz concentration camp, Josef Mengele, were never caught.

Captions:
Fig. 6: Man with Jewish star (Source: Berlin, Man with Jewish star, Bundesarchiv, via Wikipedia Commons)
Fig. 7: Star of David (Source: Star of David, Daniel Ullrich, Threedots, via Wikipedia Commons)
Fig. 8: Prisoners in Auschwitz camp (Source: Auschwitz Liberated January 1945, Unknown, assumed to be the work of the Red Army, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Fig. 9: Imprisoned children in the Auschwitz camp (Source: Mujeres y niños en los campos de concentración nazi, AlanMe123, via Wikimedia Commons).
Fig. 10: „Materials for Jewish resettlement“ served to conceal the mass murder of Jews (Source: Order of departure for a 5-tons truck with a trailer to Dessau for materi- als for Jewish resettlement, SS, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).

With the end of World War I and during the Weimar Republic, nationalist and anti-Semitic tendencies permeated society. After the failed National Socialist putsch of November 1923, Adolf Hitler, in the inflammatory pamphlet Mein Kampf, singled out the Jew as a „world enemy“ and even as a „parasite in the body of other peoples“ and called for a „struggle“ against him. Just 10 years later and less than two months after the seizure of power on January 30, 1933, the first concentration camp was set up in Dachau on March 20, 1933.

For the rapid penetration of society with Nazi ideology, the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels primarily used radio to influence the masses and bring the party and state into line. On April 24, 1933, he declared over the radio that „the radio should hammer and chisel people until they become slaves to us.“

Earlier, in Darmstadt, as the first city in the German Reich, Jewish stores were closed for 24 hours on March 28, 1933, justifying this with alleged hate propaganda by foreign Jews. In university towns, books by Jewish and other authors were thrown into the fire and their works entered in a „directory of undesirable and harmful literature.“ Civil servants were dismissed from the civil service and artists were excluded from cultural life.

More and more often, inflammatory speeches by Hitler, Goebbels and others were broadcast over the radio. Julius Streicher agitated viciously against Jews in the combat magazine „Der Stürmer“ and in 1938 published the book „Der Giftpilz“ (The Poisonous Mushroom) with invective caricatures as a supposed „mood book for young and old“.

After the seizure of power in 1933, propaganda minister Goebbels adapted the film industry to the goals of the Nazi dictatorship. Newsreels now had to serve propaganda and disinformation, but above all, quite a few anti-Semitic films were produced, such as „Jud Süß“ (1940). Radio, publishing and the film industry had an important accompanying function in the political and propagandistic repression and elimination of Jews.

In addition, the National Socialists enacted the Nuremberg Laws or Race Laws in 1935. For this purpose, Friedrich Wilhelm Euler from Bensheim had compiled data on mixed marriages and Jewish mongrels for the Reich Ministry of the Interior from 1933 and statistics on Jewish baptisms and mixed marriages for the police and Gestapo in 1936. With the „Nuremberg Laws“, the National Socialists now also created legal conditions for the intensified persecution, expulsion and extermination of Jewish fellow citizens. The laws met with widespread approval, including the obligation to wear the so-called Jewish star from the fall of 1939 as an outwardly visible sign of exclusion.

Captions
Fig. 1: The first Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, today a memorial (source: Dachau 1991, Francisco Santos, via Wikimedia Commons).
Fig. 2: Ernst Hiemer, Der Giftpilz, edited by Julius Streicher, Nuremberg: Verlag Der Stürmer, 1938. (Source: Der Giftpilz cover, Julius Streicher, via Wikipedia Commons)
Fig. 3: „Jud Süß“ movie poster, 1940 (Source: Jud Süss, Shawshots, via alamy.de).
Fig. 4: Nuremberg Laws (source: Nuremberg Laws, public domain, via Wikipedia Commons)
Fig. 5: Scheme for „Aryan Proof“ (Source: Nuremberg Laws, in the public domain, via Wikipedia Commons)