Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Ottmar Kagerer

Berlin

Ottmar Kagerer, a stonemason, worked with his hands, yet his conscience was never idle. He used his skills to support the values that were important to him. He helped to restore the Jewish graveyard in Berlin Weissensee, free of charge, after one hundred graves were demolished and smeared with Nazi symbols in October of 1999. This was not the first time that Mr. Kagerer had used his talents to make a profound statement. Yet, he wanted no special recognition for his good works. He wished to remain anonymous. After his company restored the tombstones, he began to receive serious threats.

He ignored them. In November 1999 unidentified vandals entered his workplace and destroyed more than one hundred tombstones that he had created. It was a loss of about 80,000 DM for his company. The vandals were never found or prosecuted. The gravestones and the memorials lay side by side today, uprooted and overturned, their desecration and simple inscriptions recalling the horrendous deaths of Jews in Germany. One tombstone marks the grave of Martin and Martha Dornblatt, who died in September 1942, “our unforgettable parents who fell victim to the Third Reich.” 

Another recorded the death of Amalie Guter in Berlin in October 1942, and memorialized her husband, David, “Killed in Theresienstadt,” the Nazi concentration camp. In Germany there are memorials to the more than 12,000 patriotic German Jews killed at the front fighting for their country during World War I. Just three decades later, six million European Jews were killed by the Nazis. Their tombstones are all that honor their history and their contributions to German culture, yet many have been destroyed. The work of Ottmar Kagerer involved great personal courage and pays enormous tribute to him and to those he wished to memorialize.