Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Harald Roth and Volker Mall

Herrenberg, Baden-Württemberg

In 2001, secondary school teachers Harald Roth and Volker Mall attended a local exhibition showing World War II aerial photos of what was called a “work camp” between the villages of Hailfingen and Tailfingen, about 30 kilometers south of Stuttgart. No remains of the camp exist today, but Roth and Mall knew that Hailfingen-Tailfingen had actually been something else; hundreds of Jews died there in the final year of the war. “We were driven by our duty to present the true historical facts to the public,” Roth says. “The people said it was only a work camp, but we found documents that showed it was a concentration camp.” That motivated them to do further research and uncover the real conditions at the camp.

What resulted was a profound revelation about the region’s dark World War II legacy, chronicled in a book that Roth and Mall published in 2009 titled Every Person Has a Name: Memorial Book for the 600 Jewish Prisoners of Concentration Camp Hailfingen-Tailfingen (Jeder Mensch hat einen Namen: Gedenkbuch für die 600 jüdischen Häftlinge des KZ-Außenlagers Hailfingen-Tailfingen). In it, the authors describe how, in November 1944, the Nazis brought in 600 Jews from the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig, Poland, to expand an airport for fighter planes. The prisoners were forced into hard labor, and at least 189 died in the three months the camp operated. The survivors were marched to other camps, and many more died along the way.

For Roth, what mattered most was giving back identities to so many nameless dead. “If you ask some of the survivors what their worst experience was, they don’t say hunger or illness. They say, ‘They stole my name. I was only a number,’” he says. Roth and Mall worked tirelessly to obtain a room in the town council building, where they built an extensive permanent exhibit that teaches students, locals, and visitors about the camp and the people who perished there. “Our aim in the exhibition, and in our teaching, is to give the victims their names and faces back by telling their stories and showing, through documents and photos, that this is a person, not an anonymous mass. You can say there were 600 Jews in this concentration camp, but if you tell the story of one or two of them, learning about his life beginning from childhood, people can truly feel what happened,” Roth says.

Through painstaking research, Roth and Mall have since contacted more than 120 survivors of the Hailfingen-Tailfingen camp and their descendants, hosting many who have returned to see the place where their relatives perished. In 2010, while the exhibition was running, they helped build a memorial engraved with the names of all 600 prisoners from the camp at the western end of the airstrip. They also installed a plaque with the names of 75 Jews who were first buried in a mass grave by the airfield and who were later moved to the Tailfingen cemetery. In addition, the pair has written numerous articles, given public talks, and published several other books bringing to light all that happened at the camp. Among them is Mordechai Ciechanower, the Roofer from Auschwitz-Birkenau (Mordechai Ciechanower, Der Dachdecker von Auschwitz-Birkenau), which chronicles the life of one of the camp’s survivors. Ciechanower became the first person to return to Hailfingen-Tailfingen from Israel and speak publicly about his experiences.

Roth and Mall “have undertaken a tremendous responsibility: to reveal and preserve an indescribably dark but important part of history,” says Steven Tenenbaum of Newtown, Connecticut, whose uncle died at the camp in Vaihingen an der Enz. “They have educated countless individuals—not only those who read their works and visit the sites but [also] the families of victims who would never have learned the details of that period.” For Eric Baron of Los Angeles, California—whose grandfather, Isak Abrahamovitz, died at Hailfingen but whose father, Sam Baron, survived—Roth and Mall’s meticulous research “has answered the question burning for over 60 years as to the whereabouts of my grandfather’s remains—a question which has consumed my father, who has yearned for closure.”

In October 2017, former UK Secretary of State David Miliband visited Hailfingen (along with his brother, Ed Miliband, his mother, Marion Miliband-Kozak, and his aunt, Hadassah Kosak) and learned about his own family’s previously unknown connection to the town. “Thank you most deeply for your committed and successful work to tell the story of Hailfingen’s terrible past, and teach a message of humanity to future generations,” Miliband wrote after his visit. “You have given our family an unexpected chance to find the answers to some very deep questions. I left with deep gratitude for your work and the profound impression of the way Germans are taking charge of their own history and therefore their future.”

Born in 1950 in Böblingen, Roth heard no mention of the Holocaust during his years in school. His father, born in 1929, had been in the Hitler Youth—“his whole childhood was under the influence of the Nazis,” Roth says—but was too young to serve as a soldier during World War II, and Roth’s mother was a Sudeten German forced to flee Czechoslovakia after the war. Roth majored in German language and literature and political science at university, then worked as a secondary school teacher in Berlin, where he gained experience teaching young people about the Holocaust. When Roth returned to Baden-Württemberg in 1982, he saw a need for more history books with personal stories and autobiographical material from the Nazi period, so he began collecting stories and interviewing survivors who had fled Germany and Austria; this became the subject of his first book, published in 1989. Roth’s second book told the story of young people’s brave resistance. “You have to learn facts, facts, facts. But you also need the stories of people who suffered through the history.”

Roth retired in 2013 but admits that his work for the memorial “is a full-time job.” He continues, for example, to train young people to work as volunteer guides. He and Mall have established an international summer camp during which students from across Europe come to Hailfingen to create sculptures and learn about conditions during the Holocaust. The pair is now installing a digital audio system at the site of the former camp so people with smartphones can access audio tracks to hear survivors tell their stories in their own voices. Mall, whose Nazi father was killed on the Russian front in 1942, considers himself a lifelong “anti-fascist, socialist, and pacifist” whose paramount mission as a teacher and Holocaust researcher is to expose the facts. “We want to show the truth. We can only tell young people what happened and hope that they will learn from it,” he says. “Many older people visit our exhibition, and sometimes they begin to cry as they accept the histories of the families.” At 75 years old, Mall persists in contacting survivors and their descendants.

Like Mall, Roth agrees that what is most important about their work is that young people learn from the tragedy. “It’s not the past. We are really working for the future,” he says. “Looking around the world today, we should not forget what happened in Germany. We hope Germans have learned our lesson. Everyone should know it, especially young people. They thought democracy was natural, but it isn’t natural: You must fight for it every day. The best thing is when relatives come and say, ‘Do not surrender, continue the work.’ We can never say it’s enough because next year a new generation comes, so it never ends. People should know that there were concentration camps right on their doorstep.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2018