Out of Passau: Leaving a City Hitler Called Home
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Nestled along the Danube in southern Germany, Passau is a pleasant tourist destination known for its historic buildings and scenic views at the intersection of three rivers. But for decades, the small Bavarian city suppressed an intimate association with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
Born in Passau in 1960, Anna Rosmus discovered those dark secrets as a teenager—sordid stories of slave labor, forced abortions, and a massacre of Russian POWs. In 1994, she set out to commemorate the forgotten Holocaust victims who had died there, expecting little if any controversy. What she encountered instead was an obstructionist city council, a virulently resentful local population, and an unsettling degree of latent anti-Semitism in a town whose several hundred Jewish citizens had been sent to concentration camps. Eventually the death threats led to her own emigration from Germany to the United States.
Anna Rosmus has been hailed by Marc Fisher of the Washington Post as “a rigorous researcher burning with a passion to tell the story that must be told.” In Out of Passau, she explores not only the disturbing World War II history of her hometown, but also the life-changing fallout that resulted from her determination to recognize those who had lost their lives.
Anna Elisabeth Rosmus
Anna Elisabeth Rosmus, from Passau, Germany, is an author, human rights activist, and the real-life heroine of the Academy Award–nominated film The Nasty Girl (1990). For thirty-three years she has dedicated her life to uncovering the Nazi past of her hometown in Bavaria and to combating neo-Nazis in Germany. The winner of numerous awards for her efforts in Europe, the Middle East, and North America, Rosmus represents to many the legacy of the Holocaust in memory, education, and action in the continuing struggle against bigotry and anti-Semitism.
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Out of Passau - Anna Elisabeth Rosmus
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Out Of Passau
Leaving A City Hitler Called Home
Anna Elisabeth Rosmus
Translated From The German By
Imogen Von Tannenberg
To those who instilled in me an insatiable curiosity and taught me enduring compassion for others
Contents
Chapter 1: Americans in Lower Bavaria
Chapter 2: Hitler at Home in Passau
Chapter 3: Volunteer Soldier Turns Priest
Chapter 4: The Blue-Eyed Girl
Chapter 5: A Miraculous Rescue
Chapter 6: Childhood in Passau
Chapter 7: Encounters in America
Chapter 8: A Different Kind of City Tour
Chapter 9: The Concentration Camp Next Door
Chapter 10: The DVU and a Rabbi in an SS Uniform
Chapter 11: You Won’t Be Stealing Anything around Here!
Chapter 12: Journey to the Consulate
Chapter 13: U.S. Veterans Open Their Photo Albums
Chapter 14: Christmas in Washington
Chapter 15: Where Strangers Are Not Unwanted
Epilogue
About the Author
Chapter 1
Americans in Lower Bavaria
HITLER KAPUTT!
So it was that American soldiers, in broken German, informed the inhabitants of the tiny suburb of Hals, just outside of Passau, that their Führer was dead. These very words still ring in some of the locals’ ears today, more than fifty years later. It was the first of May, 1945, at nine o’clock in the morning, when American troops appeared on the long road that leads from the pastoral countryside into town, marching their way into Hals.
When they reached the town, the Americans moved from house to house, searching each for hidden soldiers or concealed weapons. As the Americans were walking away from one particular house, located on Perlfischweg, directly on the Ilz River, the owner of the house was so relieved at having been left unharmed that he joyfully, and with a palpable sense of both surprise and relief, shouted out across the narrow river to his neighbors: It’s OK! These are actually decent people!
Soon thereafter the residents of Hals slowly began to emerge from their hiding places in their basements and their cellars. Hitler was dead. The war was over.
Just one day earlier, however, things had looked considerably different. ALL COWARDLY TRAITORS WILL BE PUT TO DEATH! LONG LIVE GERMANY! LONG LIVE THE FÜHRER!
So read the final appeal, read by many of the citizens of Passau, on Monday, 30 April 1945, in what was to be the final issue of the local newspaper, the Donauzeitung. Once one of the most powerful publications in the area, it now consisted of just one meager page. And on that day in April, this single page contained a single, final appeal. The appeal was written by Commander Major General von Hassenstein. However, by the time the appeal appeared in print and the people of Passau had a chance to read it, General von Hassenstein had long since completed the arrangements for his death by assassination—that is, his suicide—which was to be carried out in his domicile in a nearby forest.
On their approach through the Bavarian Forest, American troops first entered the Passau region on 24 April 1945. The Second SS Panzer Division, Das Reich, which on 10 June 1944 had carried out the massacre in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, had been ordered into the area surrounding Passau to prevent the American troops from crossing the Danube. However, on 29 April the division had been hastily replaced by the Passau units of the Volkssturm, which consisted by then almost exclusively of adolescents, remnants of the Hitler Youth, so that Passau had become essentially a defenseless city. A few dozen of these boys—who, it would turn out, had just massacred a group of recently released Russian POWs—were quickly disarmed by the Americans. Others were arrested and taken into custody. The rest retreated timidly.
What those American soldiers saw between the quaint towns and villages they passed through on their way to Passau was horrific. Upon their march into the picturesque town of Fürstenstein, they encountered 794 corpses: concentration camp prisoners who had been evacuated from the Buchenwald camp and then murdered and tossed into mass graves hastily dug into the swampy ground—just days before the Americans’ arrival. They found curious sights, such as the sets of train rails that had been bent into bizarre shapes from the heat and flames of the fires that had been set there—fires used to burn the victims, both those already dead and, in other cases, some who were still alive; the heaps of ash and bone lay there in this quickly improvised crematorium. When the Americans marched into Hutthurm, they initially did not find any dead bodies. A short time later, however, it was made known to the Americans by some of the locals that the town gynecologist had performed over two hundred abortions on various women who had been held during the war as forced labor on area farms. A local priest and some of his church assistants had dug up the tiny corpses in the middle of the night, under the cover of darkness. The bodies, some intact, some dismembered, had then been buried in the cemetery proper.
When the troops marched into Ruhstorf their searches turned up ever more bizarre finds: small mountains of pacifiers and children’s coffins, the remnants of the so-called offspring of alien descent
—infants killed shortly after birth. The Americans arrived too late to liberate
many of these children from their fate at what would come to be known as the murder ward.
When the troops progressed to Otterskirchen they came across the grave of the priest Ludwig Mitterer, who had been executed in Berlin-Plötzensee—the punishment for having listened to enemy broadcasts
and for preaching that Jews, too, had a basic right to life. In Egglfing, the Americans liberated eight hundred Russian POWs. When an African American unit helped liberate the town of Pocking, many of the locals ran away shrieking in fear: they had perhaps heard about, but had never actually seen, a black person. Of the 190 survivors in the auxiliary concentration camp of Pocking, exactly nine were still able to stand of their own strength. The corpses of the rest lay scattered about the surrounding area. At the Pocking train station, the soldiers discovered another fifty-six bodies—shot to death there at the very end of the war because of the so-called acute danger of escape
they posed. When the Americans arrived at Vilshofen, two surviving Russian officers led them to a mass grave in the nearby village of Neustift. The concentration camp Passau-I was also liberated by the Americans. It was quite obvious that Passau-II had been evacuated in a panic. At Passau-III, a mobile camp where the major activity was the deactivation of bombs, those prisoners who were found at all were found murdered. In the POW camps of Hacklberg, Jacking, Fatting, Rosenau, and Tiefenbach, the Americans liberated the Russian prisoners, most starved almost to the point of death and barely able to walk. Approximately 1,700 of their fellow prisoners, the Russians later informed the Americans, had been massacred in cold blood, just before the Americans’ arrival. In Tiefenbach, three surviving Russians led the Americans to a mass grave in a nearby meadow called the Schinderwiese, where human appendages of the massacred still protruded from the frozen ground. A few days later, two Russians, who had survived only by pretending to be dead and letting themselves be buried alive along with the hundreds of corpses, showed the soldiers the way to Ingling—to a spot where a playground now stands. A total of at least 748 Russian prisoners had been slaughtered and then buried there in the three nights prior to the Americans’ arrival. Only a few were ever exhumed. The corpse of Commander Major General von Hassenstein now lay buried nearby.
The Americans marched into Hals on 1 May 1945. By the morning of 2 May, shortly after Hermann Göring and his entourage had left the city in the direction of Schärding, all of Passau’s bridges had been destroyed. Emmy Göring, Hermann’s wife, owned a house in Schärding, in which a veritable gallery of stolen paintings were stored. For three days and nights the motors of the planes from the Kirchham airport could be heard running nonstop as they waited to carry away literally an entire trainload of valuables. In addition to the bridges, all water supply lines, electric cables, and other infrastructure had been destroyed. However, these acts were not committed by the Americans, nor by Hermann Göring, but rather by the local Nazis in a final attempt to prevent the entry of American troops. The Americans, however, were well prepared for such eventualities. Local resistance was quickly broken by the soldiers of the 65th U.S. Infantry Division. On 2 May the Battle for Berlin had ended as well: at three o’clock in the afternoon the last remnants of the German army had surrendered in the capital of the Third Reich. Shortly after midnight on 3 May, the capitulation for the city of Passau was signed. Four American divisions converged on the town. They set up headquarters at various points in the city. About nine o’clock on the morning of 3 May, the first major patrol of the 65th Infantry Division marched into the Residenzplatz.
The atmosphere in the city was extremely tense. In spite of repeated warnings, a professor at the local preparatory school, Dr. Maidhof, ran out into the streets in order to inform the people of the Americans’ arrival. When he not only ignored yet another appeal but proceeded to scream insults at the Americans, he was shot.
On 4 May heavy fighting still raged throughout the city, as the Schutzstaffel (SS) did not feel bound by the capitulation agreement. When American troops set out from Passau in the direction of Austria, they repeatedly came under fire by SS units. A number of Americans and approximately five hundred SS men were killed in these battles.
During the weeks and months that followed, American occupiers forced the population to disinter the mass graves, remove and clean the bodies, and then rebury them individually, properly in simple wooden coffins. The citizens were made to erect memorials and crosses, and plant flowers on the graves of the murdered. Entire graveyards came into existence in this way. A few weeks after the Americans’ arrival, locals reported that they had found a mass grave on the Ries, a hill overlooking the city from the north. According to eyewitnesses, Russian POWs had been hunted down like rabbits
and shot to death in a nearby section of the forest known as Dead Man.
Most of the bodies were never exhumed. And within a few months another sixty mass graves had been identified.
A large number of potentially damaging or implicating files were burned, in the middle of the night and under the cover of darkness, following an order from higher-ups among the brownshirts.
Potential witnesses, those who had heard or seen things firsthand, frequently disappeared unexpectedly. Other traces of crimes were simply removed.
But enough evidence remained to indict, incarcerate, and bring before the courts a few hundred of the perpetrators. A small, specialized unit of about six investigators was assigned to take into custody some of the Passau Nazis as well as any others who happened to pass through town in an attempt to escape justice. Hans Zoller, who then was part of this unit and today lives in New York, remembers arresting Ludwig Merk, an old man who had been politically active in the local branch of the Nazis. He relates how he asked Merk if he was still as enthusiastic about Hitler and his ideas. And he received the following response: I am now, and I will always be.
Apparently Merk was the only citizen of Passau to stand by his past allegiances, a fact which impressed Hans Zollner so deeply that he was moved to instantly release him from his imprisonment. Unlike Ludwig Merk, most other former Nazis would not be so forthcoming about their past.
Strange that all of these terrible events, though long past and, for many, long since forgotten, are for me still very present. It is almost unimaginable. As unimaginable as it is that fifty years later I, a native of Passau, would find myself standing face to face with some of these Americans, the very men who all those years ago had been the ones shouting out Hitler kaputt!
to my fellow countrymen; that I would one day be holding in my hands their hand-drawn plans of the lines of troop advancements and sketches of maps copied from old books; that I would be reading their diaries and private letters or making photocopies of their personal photographs from their time in Germany. Ultimately they would give me confiscated documents and appoint me an honorary member of their division. And their experiences would affect my life in such a way that it would never be the same again.
A POSTWAR AMERICAN HOMECOMING
During the time of the American military government in Passau, on 7 May 1946 the Passauer Neue Presse briefly reported in a story—buried within its pages—about a local church service. The occasion for the service was the liberation of the concentration camp Mauthausen. On Sunday, 5 May 1946 a High Mass and a Te Deum (a hymn of thanksgiving) were celebrated at the cathedral. Even the bishop was in attendance. The priest,
the story reported, had delivered an impressive sermon.
A delegation of men and women, former prisoners of Mauthausen, were present at the event. The cathedral orchestra, conducted by Choral Director Kühberger performed. Bishop Simon Konrad Landersdorfer blessed the former prisoners, and in the end, the hymn Almighty God, We Praise You
was sung.
I discovered this short article in 1980 and have not been able to forget it since. It made me reflect upon all the major celebrations that took place in Passau throughout the decades since the war. Like when the American astronaut Neil Armstrong came to town on 15 March 1985 for the grand opening of the Hotel Wilder Mann. He was flown in with his wife and another couple, and, although he had no personal connection to Passau whatsoever, Secretary of State Dr. Alfred Dick made a special trip to welcome him. Armstrong was invited to enter his name into the city’s distinguished guestbook and was treated to a cruise down the town’s famous three rivers, the Ilz, Inn, and Danube; he was given a tour of the cathedral, where a concert was given in his honor by Bishop Eder and the organist Walter Schuster, with Sister Renata from the Passau orphanage rehearsing a special hymn dedicated to him. There was the excursion to a local Passau factory and a subsequent visit to one of the quaint villages in the Bavarian Forest. Passau certainly knew how to celebrate itself and how to elevate its worldly status. This fame
would, of course, have been severely damaged had anyone pointed out that the factory, which today manufactures cog-wheels, had interned concentration camp prisoners, using them as slave labor to make parts for German tanks.
It was high time, fully fifty years after the end of the Second World War, to bring together the American liberators with the victims in some sort of true commemoration, something that would honestly address the history of the town and the region. It would be a sort of homecoming
for them, as it was their presence after the war that had been responsible not only for the liberation of the concentration camps, but for the dramatic changes in attitude, outlook, and—in apparently all but one case—allegiances among the region’s citizens that had taken place between the evening of 30 April 1945 and the morning of 1 May, quite literally, overnight.
Thus, in 1994, exactly one year before the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, I conceived of the idea to organize a service in the Passau Cathedral to commemorate the victims and to include the American liberators of Passau. I approached the Passau cultural council with this idea. My suggestion was ignored at first, not to say flat out rejected. But I was not about to give up.
Earlier, in 1988, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht,
or the Night of the Broken Glass
(the pogrom of 9–10 November 1938), the city of Passau had stubbornly refused to invite survivors of the Passau concentration camp. Instead, the citizens had decided to commemorate the occasion at the site of the heroes cemetery, or Heldenfriedhof, where, alongside five hundred SS soldiers, the body of General von Hassenstein lay buried. This, I now realize, should not have come as a surprise to me. After all, the few murdered Russians who had initially been buried there were later systematically exhumed and reburied in locations outside the city. Thereafter, war casualties buried in the cemetery were to be exclusively Aryan—included among them were many of the perpetrators. Foreign-born or Jewish victims seemed to have no place there. And in 1988, Passau’s cultural council had inadvertently—but nonetheless in what I would learn to be their typical insensitive fashion—placed a wooden Star of David between the graves of the SS men, as a memorial to the Jewish victims.
When faced with these facts, I was determined to do anything I could to change the situation in favor of a more honorable form of commemoration. For a ceremony planned for the year 1995, I wanted to find at least fifty survivors of the concentration camps as well as fifty members of the liberation forces. I planned to invite them to return to Passau to give testimony, and to celebrate the anniversary of the end of these crimes against humanity. Should any of them not be able to afford to come on their own, I was prepared to take on the costs of their trips by going on an extended lecture tour which would take me across the United States, the money generated from which could be used to help finance what was not only my dream, but doubtless the dream of many of these seniors.
On 31 May 1994 I turned to Harry Hayes. He was the historian of the 71st Infantry Division, which had been assigned to Passau in those postwar days. He informed me that the division was already planning a tour to Europe. They were to start out in Normandy and from there proceed by bus all the way to the Austrian town of Steyr, southeast of Passau. Steyr was the place where, fifty years ago, they had stopped to wait for the arrival of Russian troops from the east.
Since the capitulation of Passau had been signed on 3 May 1945 I asked the veterans if they would mind briefly interrupting their tour to come to Passau on 3 May 1995 in order to commemorate the liberation of my hometown together with survivors of various concentration camps and displaced persons. The veterans were enthusiastic about this plan and they were ready to do whatever it took to be a part of it. Calvin V. Rogers, who was now a violinist and the conductor of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, told me how touched he and his comrades were when they received my invitation. He also asked if they would get a chance to hear the famous Passau Cathedral organ be played. Ninety people agreed to come and they were due to arrive in Passau on 3 May 1995.
On 18 July 1994 I extended an offer to Dr. Brunner, of the Passau cultural council, as well as to the members of the Passau city council, to read the enthusiastic letters I had received from the Americans. That way they could see for themselves how sincere the American veterans were, and how much they were looking forward to a return to Passau. In the meantime, approximately one hundred of the veterans had indicated that they would be coming. I continued to petition for just enough money to cover an overnight stay in a hotel and to fund a reception at city hall to be made available for this group to make a one-day visit to Passau. There also was to be an organ concert at the cathedral and a short cruise on the Danube. Additionally I suggested inviting the citizens of Passau to the reception in order to facilitate and encourage contact between the two groups. For the following day I had planned for them to attend a short memorial service to be held at the cathedral. I felt it was especially important to ask students from local schools to participate in this event.
The city fathers kept me waiting with their response. On 7 September, however, we were certain that some 140 U.S. veterans would be arriving in Passau on 3 May. On the morning of the next day the men of the 71st Infantry Division would leave Passau and travel further to Gunskirchen in Austria, where fifty years earlier they had liberated the concentration camp there. Again I turned to Dr. Brunner of the Passau office of cultural affairs and to the bishop of Passau, Dr. Franz Xaver Eder. He had attended college with my uncle and had been a close friend of my family’s ever since. I was certain that he was a person who would be open to my request. I asked him to permit an interfaith service on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war to take place in the cathedral. I wrote, In your role as bishop, it would be certainly within your power to make this possible. In addition, I would like to ask you to extend an invitation to the general public. In 1946 and 1947 Bishop Simon Konrad had granted similar such requests. Since then no such an event has been held. For most of the U.S. soldiers this trip to Passau may well be their last major journey, and I am simply trying to make them happy.
And because time was of the essence, I also asked my grandmother, who was nearly one hundred years old and had known the bishop since his youth, to write a letter to him stating my case.
This was only the second time in my life that I had known my grandmother to write a letter. The first one she had addressed to me, shortly after my move to the United States in the summer of 1994. Since then she had called me almost every day. She knew how important it was to me to see the memorial service become a reality, and so she sat down to write what would become her second letter. On 31 October 1994 the bishop gave his consent. He wrote back, saying that he saw no reason not to come together at the cathedral for an interfaith prayer. And the famous Passau organ, he said, had no reason to remain silent for the service.
Nevertheless, one day before the American veterans were to arrive, the city of Passau had arranged for a similar event, something they called a commemoration celebration,
to take place on 2 May, the day of the occupation of Passau by the Americans. The celebration began at five-thirty in the evening, at the Innstadt cemetery in Passau. Not a single survivor of the various concentration camps and not a single former slave laborer had been invited to participate. Once again, the city held its celebration at the location of the SS graves, where they erected a Hungarian cross, the symbol of the Hungarian SS. In the meantime, a Star of David had been cemented into the ground directly before the gravesite of the SS General Hassenstein. The Jewish community of Lower Bavaria was sent an invitation to formally participate in the celebration, which its president, Israel Offmann, had refused. Instead, he insisted that the concrete block holding the Star of David be removed.
If I could not prevent the celebration honoring the SS General, I at least wanted to organize a sort of counter celebration. Thus, while the city of Passau was holding its commemoration celebration, I and a number of others stood at the grave of pastor Johann Bergmann, the so-called hero of Nammering,
who had saved the lives of some 3,000 concentration camp prisoners. He had done so at the end of 1945 by physically confronting the SS man in charge of deportation, Hans Merbach, and demanding that he recall the order of execution by firing squad that was set to take place there in Nammering and immediately release the prisoners from the train cars in which they were being held. In addition, he had personally collected enough food from the people in his small community to feed the prisoners, of whom almost all were Jews, during the period that the train would remain in Nammering before leaving for Dachau. Many would nevertheless perish during the transport, but many others, who would have met a certain death by firing squad in Nammering, had him to thank for their lives.
The next day, around four o’clock in the afternoon, on the city square in front of the Passau town hall, were gathered 144 veterans of the 71st Infantry Division and their relatives. A display board had been erected, upon which were copies of records and photographs documenting the crimes the American soldiers had witnessed or been informed about. I opened the ceremony with a brief word of welcome and then read a list of the documented crimes. Rabbi Paul Silton, of the Albany, New York, synagogue Temple Israel, was in attendance and, while speaking about the collective pain that these crimes inflicted, went on to explain what had brought him all the way across the Atlantic to Passau on that day. As the crowd began lighting white and yellow candles by passing the flame from one person to another in symbolic remembrance of the victims of National Socialism in Germany in general, and Passau in particular, Rabbi Silton reminded everyone that though not all the victims of the horrible deeds were Jews, all Jews were indeed victims. Rabbi Silton commented on the undeniable beauty of the city of Passau, there at the confluence of the three rivers, while admonishing the citizens of the city