Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Horst Moog

Hamm/Sieg, Rhineland-Palatinate

On the night of November 9, 1938, 3-year-old Horst Moog stood beside his mother and watched the beautiful synagogue of Hamm, on the Sieg River in Rhineland-Palatinate, burn to the ground during Kristallnacht. “I can never forget it,” he recalls. Some years prior, Moog’s grandmother had worked as a housekeeper for a Jewish family named David, and she had been forced to quit when she was threatened with arrest after the Nazis seized power. Later, Moog’s father, who worked for the German railways, returned from Lodz, Poland, during World War II with dark descriptions of the Jewish ghetto.

“He had seen the evil treatment and the suffering of the Jewish people at the ghetto of Lodz, and he spoke about this,” Moog says, “but no one believed him, and he was threatened with being reported to the Gestapo.” Moog recalls another of his father’s experiences: On a hot summer day while working for the railway, his father saw people on a cargo train crying out for water. “He hurried to fill an old bucket with water and passed it up to the car when he saw an SS guard point a gun at him. Those early experiences and stories have always been in my memory, and I couldn’t understand how this could be done to people.”

Those formative experiences have led Moog, now 82, to devote decades of his life to researching, exhibiting, and preserving the rich histories of the Jewish communities that once populated his Westerwald region between Koblenz and Cologne. For more than a quarter of a century, Moog singlehandedly restored, cleaned, and maintained the gravestones in Hamm’s Jewish cemetery. Through painstaking work, he assembled vast archives that chronicle his town’s centuries-old Jewish community and contributed to permanent exhibitions for museums throughout the region. This includes one at the Kulturhaus (community center) in Hamm, where he established a Jewish museum in the David family’s former home.

For many years, Moog lectured at schools, churches, and public events to raise awareness of Jews’ contributions to the region and their persecution by the Nazis. Meanwhile, he showed families’ descendants the houses of their ancestors, along with documents and photos of how life had been in the Jewish community.

As a result of his relentless work, Moog faced public hostility and even anonymous death threats. Nevertheless, he persisted. Even after suffering heart attacks in 1990 and 2002, Moog continued to document the region’s Jewish legacy. He provided a conclusive chronicle of events dating from 1633—when, for the first time, a Jew sought protection at relatives’ houses in Hamm—through the 1930s, when all 119 of Hamm’s Jews were either driven out or deported to their deaths. “I asked myself, ‘How could this injustice and these crimes happen?’” Moog says. “After the war, nobody wanted to [believe they had] participated. Nobody had seen or known anything. There were years of silence. I couldn’t and wouldn’t accept this. I felt the duty to keep the memories of the former vibrant life of the Jewish community and its people alive. This is why authentic documentation is so important and has to be preserved.”

Debbie, Mark, and Karen David’s great-grandparents once lived in the David house, and their father Fred escaped from Hamm shortly after Kristallnacht, immigrating with his parents and sister to the United States. They praise Moog for his tireless efforts “to research the history of Hamm’s once vibrant Jewish community, reaching out to its surviving former residents, caring for and restoring the Jewish cemetery, and sharing this history with his community in lectures, written articles, and curated exhibits.” Kansas resident Steven Cole, whose great-grandparents also once inhabited the David house, explains, “Through Moog’s efforts, spread across so many of his 82 years, evidence of Jewish life in Hamm has been preserved.”

Born in 1935, Moog finished grade school in Hamm. Rather than going on to high school, he began an apprenticeship with a sporting goods wholesaler. A few years later, his father suggested he start an administrative career with the railways in Cologne. For the next 40 years, Moog traveled 70 kilometers each day to his office. Still he somehow found time for voluntary activities: He served for 25 years on the Hamm town council, for example, and also worked as a sports trainer in soccer, tennis, skiing, and track and field.

Then, while viewing old photographs with a colleague on his long train journeys to Cologne, Moog’s curiosity about local history was piqued. He began documenting the history of sports, singing, and other clubs in the region; when he saw the abundance of Jewish names attached to the clubs’ histories, his perspective changed. “I began to think about the fate of these people and started to work intensively on the Jewish community in Hamm. There was hardly any information about the Jews with whom people there had once lived.”

When the death threats started, Moog was even forced to obtain police protection, particularly around the period in 1988 when he organized an exhibit for the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht. “Over weeks, our phone was monitored by the police. But I continued my research, and we had a big exhibition where every day for two weeks we gave presentations, showing objects, documents, and photos while explaining what happened. I told people about the first Jews who founded a community here, about their lives, how they lived, the beginning of the Nazi period, the synagogue burning, all that happened here. Old people from Hamm said, ‘We’ve never seen this,’ and they cried when they left the exhibition. The people were shocked to see all that had occurred here.” In the exhibition at the David house, the public can now view a Torah from 1850 that Moog accidentally rediscovered in Hamm, along with photographs, documents, old stones from the synagogue, menorahs, and other artifacts revealing Jewish life and history.

It was particularly important to Moog that many young people have come to Hamm: More than 260 teachers and students have used the exhibition and his presentations to learn about Jewish history. “Young people must know about it so that it never happens again,” he says. “This was a shame for Germany and for humanity. But today I have the impression that many people aren’t interested. They don’t want to know more. The Nazi movement has never disappeared; it is still in some people’s heads. It has always been my goal to preserve the rich history of our Jewish fellow citizens and to counteract efforts of others to obliterate them.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2018