Obermayer Award

“It is very important to deal with this darkest chapter honestly” 

Josef Wisskirchen has spent a lifetime helping people understand the truth

by Toby Axelrod

In 2014, Marlene Straus received a letter from Josef Wisskirchen. Straus had fled from Germany to the United States with her father at the end of 1938, when she was seven years old. “I am a German historian. I am writing a book about the Jewish families in Rommerskirchen,” Wisskirchen wrote. 

“A long list of information about my family and our lives followed… My first reaction was, ‘What kind of scam is this?’” recalls Straus, who visited Germany in 2019. “I soon found out it was not a scam. So began a beautiful, meaningful relationship with Josef Wisskirchen.”

Among the things Straus learned was that her father’s close friend, Johann Trippen, had helped her family flee from the town of Rommerskirchen in 1939, and that he had assisted other Jews in hiding from the Nazis. Today, Trippen’s granddaughter, Andrea, is in regular touch with Straus. 

“As a family we have shared the knowledge [Wisskirchen] has brought to our lives, and some of us have visited with him in his home,” she says, adding that she and her family consider the Wisskirchens to be “friends, not acquaintances. We continue to learn and relive our history and our heritage.” 

In his home village of Stommeln, in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia, and in nearby areas such as Rommerskirchen, people know that Josef Wisskirchen is the person to contact if you want to know about local Jewish history.

Teachers and pupils, ordinary German citizens, and Jews around the world in search of their roots: All have found a road map and concrete facts in Wisskirchen’s many books, and in conversation with him. And they have found something more: a man with a moral compass, a well of empathy, and a lifelong commitment to confronting the past for the sake of the future.

Wisskirchen, a retired high school teacher, has dedicated much of his life to making sure that the Jewish past of his small village and others is not forgotten. “You have to talk about the concrete impact [of persecution] on individuals, so the history of the Jews and what happened to them is not abstract… They were the neighbors of our ancestors and thus part of the village community,” he says.

“The Holocaust made all the Jews of Stommeln vanish,” says local high school student Ciara Neil, 18, who recently consulted Wisskirchen’s books on local Jewish history for a class memorial project. “If we don’t remember them, they will just disappear again.”

When Wisskirchen was a student, such books were hard to come by, at best.

Born in 1939 in Bonn, Wisskirchen remembers the fiery air raids of World War II. He recalls hiding with his mother and five brothers in bomb shelters and remembers the arrival of American soldiers, who threw chocolate bars from their Sherman tanks. Young Josef ran home in his Lederhosen, prize in hand. “All my brothers were around the table; my mother opened the chocolate and everyone had a piece.”

At the time, his mother was anxiously waiting for news of her husband, in a Soviet prison camp. “Other POWs came back and told her, ‘Your husband is alive.’ But later she learned he was not. She broke down,” says Wisskirchen. 

Wisskirchen knew the immediate impact of war. But he knew nothing about the hatred that Nazis had whipped up against Jews. He knew nothing about the genocide, and certainly nothing about Germany’s prewar Jewish population. His inner revolution began as a teenager when, out of the blue, a teacher screened Alain Resnais’ powerful, graphic 1956 documentary about the concentration camps, “Night and Fog.” 

“The theme had not been dealt with in school,” he says. “The images did not leave me alone… It was a diabolical world that seemed to have nothing to do with my world.”

But as he would later understand, it had everything to do with his world. The deliberate erasure of memory had left its negative impression. After Wisskirchen became a teacher himself, he made it his life’s work to fill in those gaps and ensure that others not forget. Some people still say “this history has nothing to do with us,” he says. But facing the past “helps us all set our moral coordinates.” It’s not about guilt and not about shame; it’s about truth and human connections.

“I myself have thought about the crimes that were committed. That has helped me distinguish right and wrong,” he says. “And for me personally, the greatest satisfaction from my work is to start such a process of self-discovery in others, too.”

Discovering a Synagogue

Over the decades, Wisskirchen has researched and written numerous books about local Jewish history, piecing together the biographies of local Jews and connecting with their descendants. Warm friendships have ensued. He has helped establish memorials and given countless lectures. And since his retirement in 2003, he keeps on going, sharing his knowledge with the younger generation.

Wisskirchen has lived in the village of Stommeln, part of the township of Pulheim, since 1966. He taught German and history at the Erasmus-Gymnasium in Grevenbroich from 1967 to 2003.  

The 1960s was a decade of awakening in Germany. Starting with the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and continuing with the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, the public was confronted with crimes against humanity committed in their name by high officials and also by ordinary Germans.

For Wisskirchen, it became clear that the local story was key to understanding the bigger picture. 

His work on Jewish history began in earnest in 1977, after he joined his village’s newly founded history association. In the same year a small tornado uncovered the roof of the former synagogue.

When Wisskirchen heard this, “My ears perked up,” he says. Although he had already lived in Stommeln for 12 years, he didn’t know the town had a synagogue.

They visited the site. The two-story, 19th century brick building with Moorish details was in a miserable state, he recalls. “A farmer had bought it [from the Jewish community] in 1937 and used it as his shed. He was barely using it by now, and it was full of junk and rubbish.”

The association took on the synagogue as its first big project, says Wisskirchen, who soon became the group’s deputy chair. (He stepped down in 2010 to make room for younger leadership).

They learned that Stommeln’s first documented Jewish population dated to the early 14th century. Those first Jews were driven out in the pogroms of the 1350s. Not until the 18th century was a new Jewish settlement established. At its peak in 1861, it had 78 members. 

In 1882, the community built a new synagogue. But by 1890 there were only 40 Jews living in Stommeln. And by 1937, four years into the Nazi regime, most of them had fled smaller towns for the relative anonymity of city life. That’s when the Jewish community of Cologne sold the building to the farmer.

The last Jews of Stommeln were deported by the Nazis in 1942. Approximately 20 Jews who were born or lived there were murdered. But the former synagogue was left standing, because it was owned by a non-Jew.

The association reconstructed this history, and the fates of the last Jews of Stommeln, with help from a local Jewish man who had survived in hiding: Hermann Jacobsohn, who, as a survivor, was able to request information from archives. Born in 1895 in Stommeln, he later lived in Cologne, where he died in 1990.

The entire project was supported by then-mayor Karl August Morisse and the village’s director of cultural affairs, the late Gerhard Dornseifer, Wisskirchen says. In 1979, the Pulheim municipality purchased the building. It was rededicated in 1983 and is primarily used today for cultural events.

Meanwhile, Wisskirchen co-authored a two-volume work on “Jews in Stommeln. History of a Jewish Community in the Cologne Area” (Juden in Stommeln. Geschichte einer jüdischen Gemeinde im Kölner Umland), in 1983 and 1987. “The books sold out,” says Wisskirchen. “And it was a turning point. Before, it was a time of not wanting to know, a time of looking away. Now, the history of Jews in Pulheim-Stommeln became present.”

The books sparked a German TV film in 1988. That same year, Wisskirchen published a documentation about local events during Germany’s anti-Jewish pogrom of November 1938, known as Kristallnacht:  “Pogrom on the Rhine and Erft.” (Reichspogromnacht an Rhein und Erft).

Around that time, Wisskirchen lamented in a public talk that while the town was still laying wreaths at the memorial for fallen soldiers and victims of war, no one publicly remembered the murdered Jews of Stommeln. “That was all I said,” he recalls. “And then a Stommeln resident, Hermann Schweren, came over to me and said he wanted to start something.” With Wisskirchen’s help,  a memorial plaque was installed with the names of all 20 Jewish Holocaust victims from Stommeln.

“The text says they were murdered, not that they simply died,” Wisskirchen notes. Another level of denial, peeled away. 

In 2002, Wisskirchen suggested that a memorial be set up in nearby Brauweiler, at the site of an early concentration camp that the Gestapo later used as a prison. The Rhineland Regional Council  commissioned him to develop a permanent exhibition, which he did with historian Hermann Daners. Their memorial opened in 2008. He and Daners also produced two books on the Nazi-era history of Brauweiler and, until the pandemic hit in 2020, Wisskirchen would give regular tours at the memorial for school groups and others.

Another high point for Wisskirchen occurred in 2011, when teacher Carsten Mayer from the Papst-Johannes XXIII high school in Pulheim invited him to speak to his class about the fate of Jewish children in Stommeln. “I showed them pictures of these kids,”  Wisskirchen says, “and the pupils who were listening to me… recognized themselves in these children.”

When he told them that a former Jewish resident, Auschwitz survivor Rudy Herz, was living in the United States, they decided to invite him. “They wrote to him. He was 85 years old. He said right away, ‘I am coming.’”

Three hundred people came to hear Herz speak at the high school. He spoke for more than three hours. “And he could have kept on going… He has become the symbolic figure for the Jewish history of Stommeln,” says Wisskirchen, who published Herz’ biography in 2012.  [Video: an interview with Rudy Herz]

That public gathering with Herz, who died some months later, brought up many powerful memories that people had tried to bury, Wisskirchen says. “There was shame. When in 1942 the town auctioned off the belongings of the Jewish family Stock, townspeople bought chairs or tables for very little money,” he says. Some of these items are likely still in local homes. “There were so many ways in which the villagers had looked away.”

Still a Key Resource

Recently, students from the Geschwister Scholl high school in Pulheim were engaged in a memorial project and wanted to know about a local Jewish family. Their teacher, Jens Tanzmann, told them: “Call Mr. Wisskirchen.”

The students wanted to install stumbling stone memorials (Stolpersteine)—small brass markers embedded in the sidewalks in front of a Jewish family’s last home before being deported. The students learned a lot from Wisskirchen’s book about Jewish life in Stommeln, says Tanzmann.

“They are interested in Nazism, and some of my students are from perpetrator families,” says Tanzmann, whose own grandfather was in the Wehrmacht.  “We talk about that as well, about what happened in their family during 1933-45, and what happened in Jewish families, so they can compare.”

His students focused on the history of Jakob Stock and his family, who were deported in 1942. Two of Stock’s children were murdered in the Holocaust. His youngest daughter escaped to London. “My students got in touch with her son, Peter Altman,” Tanzmann says. With the family’s permission, a stumbling stone memorial (Stolperstein) will be installed at Nettegasse 9, in March 2022.

Neil, the high school student who was a member of the class, says Wisskirchen’s work helped in many ways. “In the back of his book, there is a list of the Jews who were deported” and their fate. The book “gave us insight into how life was in Stommeln in the 1940s. There are many individual stories, like neighbors who helped them hide from the Nazis.”

She and her classmates convinced local politicians to back their memorial project. “I don’t think we could have done this nearly as well if we didn’t have his insights,” Neil says. Such memorials are important, “especially in a small village where a lot of old people live,” she adds. “They tend to say, ‘That was no one we knew; it was just the scary Germans’… So we want the stumbling stones to be there as a reminder.”

Wisskirchen says he’s never encountered any opposition to his work. “I think it’s because I have always tried to stick with the facts and don’t moralize. That sends a message of honesty.”

Teaching history, he says, “is about thinking about the past to understand ourselves… For us Germans it is very important to deal with this darkest chapter honestly, to understand who we are, so nothing like this can ever happen again.”

Could it happen again? He used to be certain it couldn’t. Today, he worries about the rise of right-populist politics. Leaders of one party once called the Holocaust “mere bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history” and described Germany’s national Holocaust memorial as “a memorial to shame.”

“That is disgusting,” Wisskirchen says. “We have to do everything we can to stop them, everything we can to put out every small fire.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2022