Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Rolf Schmitt

Bruchsal, Baden-Württemberg

In 2008, Rolf Schmitt watched a film about the destruction of his city, Bruchsal, on March 1, 1945, by American and British bombers. The credits showed a list of around 1,000 Bruchsalers killed that day, and a good friend asked Schmitt why there were no Jewish people, no Jewish names on the list. This was the starting point for Schmitt to embark on a search.

Schmitt’s investigation into Bruchsal’s Jewish past led him to discover that one of the city’s former Jewish businessmen, Otto Oppenheimer, had written a famous song about Bruchsal, “Brusler Dorscht” (“Bruchsal Thirst”), which is still sung today. Oppenheimer fled to the U.S. in 1938 and hardly anybody in Bruchsal remembered who wrote the tune, so Schmitt started a campaign to get a city street or square named after Oppenheimer. At first “the community showed little interest, nobody was interested in the theme,” Schmitt recalls.

But he persisted. He wrote a series of articles, among others for Jüdische Allgemeine, trying to put pressure on the city to recognize Oppenheimer’s historic contribution. Schmitt wanted Otto-Oppenheimer-Platz to replace Holzmarkt, a square known as Adolf-Hitler-Platz until 1945. In 2011, after lengthy debate, Schmitt’s vision prevailed and the square was renamed. As it turned out, his work was only beginning. “I saw that there was not only Otto Oppenheimer, but 700 Jewish people who had lived before World War Two in Bruchsal, and who are not here again,” Schmitt says. “That was the start of my interest in the Jewish people of Bruchsal.”

According to Michael Simonson of the Leo Baeck Institute, “Through the story of the Oppenheimer family and the renaming of the square, much more was unearthed—other names, details of what had happened, stories of escape and also collaboration, and a new resolve adopted by the town to find out even more. Schmitt has worked tirelessly and with great personal passion to remember and memorialize the Jewish past of Bruchsal, and is without question the individual leading the entire process of German and Jewish reconciliation for his city.”

In his research, Schmitt discovered that 700 to 900 Jews had lived in the Baden-Württemburg city before the war, and that about 120 of them were deported on Oct. 22, 1940, to the Gurs internment camp in southwestern France. He researched family histories, conducted interviews, reconnected with descendants of former Bruchsal Jews, and initiated the effort to install the city’s first Stolpersteine. Again, Schmitt faced a wall of public resistance.

“There were arguments like, ‘We don’t need such a thing. If we have a lot of money, we’ll build a monument for these people,’” Schmitt recalls. “An email from officials even told me the city would have to pay 120,000 euros to make the Stolpersteine, which was totally ridiculous.” Once more, Schmitt remained undeterred. He won support from the Gemeindrat (City Council) and in 2014 he founded Koordinationsgruppe Stolpersteine (Stolpersteine Coordination Group), which has since planted 21 Stolpersteine in the city. The group intends to install 10 to 12 Stolpersteine in 2017, and each year after, which has inspired a local teacher and his students to get involved.

“The first year, my job was to find the names and the houses. But meanwhile this has become a job for the local school,” says Schmitt. “It’s very important the research is made by young people who are searching for the families. It’s important to know what happened, and it’s important to know that such a thing may never happen again. If you forget this history, anybody at any time can do the same thing again. If you don’t know what it means to have a totalitarian system, you can’t fight against it. The young people should know what happened.”

Born in 1951 in the town of Hemsbach, close to Mannheim, Schmitt moved to Bruchsal as a child and grew up without his father, who was a soldier in WWII and “never lost his hatred of Jews. He was anti-Semitic until he died,” says Schmitt. At school he learned about German history, but the teachers always “stopped at 1933, before the Holocaust or National Socialism. They didn’t speak about this and I never heard anything about the issue.”

For decades, Schmitt has felt haunted by the glass cabinet he inherited from his mother, which his grandmother bought from a Jewish family when they were forced to flee Hemsbach. The cabinet still remains in his cellar because he has found himself unable either to use it or to get rid of it, given what he knows happened to the Jews in his region. Even more significant for Schmitt was a trip he made, at 26, to the nearby village of Obergrombach, where he saw stones with Hebrew lettering lining both sides of a narrow path. Schmitt discovered that Nazis had taken the gravestones from the town’s Jewish cemetery to use as gutters, and published an article about his findings in a youth journal. (The gravestones were eventually taken from the path and returned to Obergrombach’s Jewish cemetery.)

Schmitt visited the Volksschule and later trained to become an Industriekaufmann (industrial clerk). He earned his Bachelors degree in Business Administration, worked as a Steuerberater (tax consultant), and later ran a health food company and worked as the head of administration for a private university in Bruchsal. But since 2008, his driving motivation has been to recover the Jewish legacy of his town, educating old and young generations alike.

Schmitt spearheaded efforts to mount a plaque in the city center commemorating the Jewish lawyer and socialist Ludwig Marum, originally from Bruchsal, who led the Social Democratic Party in Baden’s parliament from 1914 to 1928. Marum was later elected to the Reichstag where he served until his arrest in 1933, and in 1934 he became one of the first Jews murdered by the Nazis. In addition to writing many articles, Schmitt co-edited the book Oppenheimer: Eine jüdische Familie aus Bruchsal (Oppenheimer: A Jewish Family from Bruchsal) and produced the “Gedenkschrift zur ersten Stolperstein verlung in Bruchsal”
(Commemorative Magazine for the First Stolpersteine Laying in Bruchsal), which was published on the occasion of the placement of the first Stolpersteine, and wrote an article for the periodical Badische Heimat (Baden Homeland) on “Gedenkarbeit für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus in Bruchsal” (commemorative work for the victims of National Socialism in Bruchsal). After a fellow campaigner had fought resistance and successfully forced local government to open to the public a film from the Bruchsal city archives, which had previously been kept hidden, about the deportation of Bruchsal’s Jews in October 1940, Schmitt made it available to a worldwide audience via YouTube.

Schmitt continues to work on constructing the family trees of former Jews from Bruchsal, self-financing his trips overseas to meet with their descendants. Looking ahead, he hopes to renovate the city’s Tahara house, where bodies were traditionally washed before burial, but which has sat empty beside the Jewish cemetery since the war. For Schmitt, “it’s important for everyone” that the Jewish legacy of Bruchsal is remembered, celebrated and discussed.

“We should be active for future generations,” he says. “It should be normal to speak about this issue, it should be normal to know what happened at that time, and it should be normal that we shouldn’t forget the biggest crime that ever happened in civilization.”