Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Karl and Hanna Britz

Bodersweier, Baden-Württemberg

In 1983, Karl Britz, a primary school teacher and member of the town council of Bodersweier, was asked to help write a village history commemorating the town’s 1,100-year anniversary. Since he only had vague knowledge of the former Jewish community in Bodersweier, this was the starting point for his wife and himself to research the lives of their former Jewish neighbors. “You can’t write this book without writing the story of the ancient Jewish community,” the couple said. “That was the beginning.”

After further research working with Hans Nussbaum, a friend on the town council, in 1986 the full history of the Jewish community was published under the title The Fate of the Jews from Bodersweier (Das Schicksal der Juden von Bodersweier). It is an extensive chronicle of the town’s Jewish past, from the mid-18th century through the early 1940s, which includes the first-ever documented record of every Jew who had lived in Bodersweier until the Nazis came to power.

Previously, in 1984, Karl Britz and Nussbaum initiated a memorial to the town’s Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, which was installed at the local cemetery. “It was the first recognition of the full extent of the village’s Jewish past,” Karl says.

The Britzes didn’t stop there. They made successive trips to New York, France, and Israel to meet with Jewish survivors from Bodersweier along with their descendants. Karl published numerous articles documenting the town’s Jewish legacy as well as several other books, including Luck, An Outstanding Luck (Glück, ganz besonderes Glück), about the remarkable struggle for survival of Jules and Denise Kaufmann, a Baden-Alsatian couple, who ended up in occupied France. In his children’s book, Das Doppeldipp von Dappelsheim, one chapter deals with the discrimination of a Jewish schoolgirl, teaching about the importance of not following the crowd.

The Britzes also created birth, marriage, and death registries for every Jew of Bodersweier dating back two centuries, and they developed customized family trees for all the families; the transcriptions of those registries are now available on the website for Familienforschung Bodersweier (“Bodersweier Family Research”). Meanwhile, through regular speeches at schools and public forums, Karl has succeeded in teaching students and townspeople about the rich Jewish culture that has vanished.

Born during World War II in Bodersweier, a small village located a few miles from the French border in Baden-Württemberg, Karl and Hanna Britz each grew up knowing little about their town’s Jewish past. Karl’s father was a farmer, and Hanna’s father worked in the railway service. “We didn’t have experiences with Jewish people because in 1940, all the Jewish people were sent away to France,” Karl recalls. In their youth, the Britzes remember watching films and learning about the Holocaust in school but had no awareness of the tragedy that befell the Jewish community in their own backyard.

“It has, and continues to be, Karl Britz’s mission to educate young people and adults about the destruction of Bodersweier’s Jewish community, as well as [about] the contributions that Jews had previously made to the vitality of the village and its neighboring communities,” says Ethan Bensinger of Deer eld, Illinois, whose relatives constituted one of the largest Jewish families in town. “Without Britz’s extraordinary contributions, the history of Jewish Bodersweier and its families would have been forever lost.” Another Bodersweier descendant, Shlomit Klein of Nahariya, Israel, praises Britz as “a lifelong teacher and educator committed to not only remembering and commemorating but also imparting the lessons learned from these horrible events in history to the next generation in order to prevent them from recurring.”

But not all of Bodersweier’s residents have welcomed the Britzes’ efforts to dig up the Nazi past. “This was particularly the case with people who were confronted with restitution demands after the war and felt treated unfairly,” Karl says. “Former members of the NSDAP [Nazi Party] were less critical because no one from the town was accused of having committed crimes. On Kristallnacht, for instance, SS men were brought into Bodersweier to demolish the synagogue and take all the Jewish men over age 16 to the Dachau concentration camp.”

In 2005, Karl and his primary school class participated in an ecumenical youth project mahnmal (memorial) to commemorate the more than 5,600 Jews from 139 communities in Baden who were deported to the internment camp in Gurs in 1940; a memorial stone created with the schoolchildren was placed in the center of town. “The project was a good way to introduce children to the Jewish history of our town,” Karl recalls. “They talked with their parents about it, and their grandparents, and it helped spark an exchange.”

Karl and Hanna have played complementary roles in their painstaking work to recover the Jewish history of their town. While Karl focused more on research and writing, Hanna was instrumental in organizing their many meetings with the descendants of Bodersweier’s Jews. She helped transcribe documents, conduct interviews, and maintain relationships with the families, which enabled the Britzes to continue learning about the town’s past. “This is work you can’t do alone,” Karl says. “Hanna was full of ideas and suggestions, and she helped earn people’s trust. Since a lot of documents aren’t in Latin letters, but in old German letters (Sütterlin script or even [older versions of] Kurrent), her help with transcriptions from regional and local sources is of particular importance.” Hanna also served as Karl’s in-house editor, working with him to re ne his articles and books into nished works.

Since 2011, Karl has also been involved in the installation of Stolpersteine, small plaques identifying Jews’ former homes, in nearby Kehl. Under the auspices of a group called 27. Januar (“January 27”) committed to memorializing the region’s perished Jews, 18 new stones were placed in 2017, bringing the town’s total to 63. The couple also continues to guide the descendants of Bodersweier Jews and other interested people through the Jewish cemeteries of Freistett and Kehl.

What matters most today, Karl says, is that the younger generation seize on the Britzes’ work and continue to keep the memory of Bodersweier’s Jewish past alive. “For us it has become a part of our life,” he says. “Especially today, it’s important that we learn about what happened in the 19th and early 20th century, and how all this ended with the terrible crimes against Jewish fellow citizens in the Nazi period. We have to be careful that this can’t be repeated. When we look at reports from Germany and other European countries—about the hatred and violence against foreigners, against Muslim refugees, and also against Jews—we realize that the Nazis did not invent the persecution of Jews. Anti-Semitism existed before Hitler came to power in 1933. We must ght against prejudice, and with the example of what happened to the Jews, we must show what discrimination against individual groups can lead to. I think this is a very important lesson for the present and the future—not only in Germany.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2018