Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Thilo Figaj

Lorsch, Hesse

A decade ago, the cosmetics manufacturer Thilo Figaj came across a post-World War II history book with a chapter about his Hessen town, Lorsch, and was shocked to discover it omitted mention of the town’s most infamous son: Heinz Jost, a top-ranking SS commander in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office) who served directly under Reinhard Heydrich and stood accused, at the Nuremberg Trials, of overseeing the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the former Soviet Union. The book’s failure to cite Jost, who had attended the same school and played soccer in the same club as Figaj, disturbed him deeply. “This book did not tell the entire truth, so I decided to do research on this man, write a book about him, and tell the truth,” he says.

Figaj’s exhaustive research led him to archives in Riga and Berlin, spurring his publication of a two-part article about the crimes committed by Jost on the same day, March 10, 1942, when Lorsch’s Jews were deported to the death camps. His book remains in progress, but Figaj in the meantime has uncovered the history of Lorsch’s Jewish community dating back to the Thirty Years War—a legacy previously unknown to anyone, which Figaj feels helps to give citizens back their identity.

“They hear everything about the 1,250-year history of Lorsch, but they haven’t heard an important part of this history, which is Jewish history. The Jews have built Lorsch as others have done, [and that] Jewish history belongs to Lorsch,” he says. “If you are missing the background of the Jewish families exterminated in the last century in your town, you are missing the entire story—you cannot tell the story of the 19th, 18th and 17th centuries, and all the interesting events and people, because you have not cleaned up your house. At the same time, you are losing a part of your own Germany identity.”

Born in 1956 near Osnabrück, Figaj grew up in Cologne, later Bavaria, and finally in the medieval Upper Rhine town of Lorsch, located 50 kilometers south of Frankfurt. Figaj’s first personal encounter with Jewish history happened while working at a pharmaceutical company in Mannheim, where he had a Jewish girlfriend whose mother had experienced “kind of an Anne Frank story” of hiding in Mannheim during the war and whose father had survived the Dachau concentration camp. In the 1980s, Figaj, along with his father and brother, bought Lady Esther Cosmetics, a former leading U.S. brand, and as he researched the company’s files his interest grew. “I went into the family history and found out that they were Jews, that they had come from Russia as early as 1905 or before, and I got in contact with the family,” he says. After that, “I got educated, I learned more about Jews and more about history, and I absorbed everything I could learn from the Nazi dictatorship and our history of the 20th century.”

In 2011, as a member of Lorsch’s parliament, Figaj urged the town to restore and improve a memorial commemorating the dozens of Lorsch Jews deported in the Holocaust. Despite facing opposition from local political figures, Figaj recalls, “I quietly decided that I would tell all the others the story of the Jews of Lorsh.” A simultaneous conflict emerged over whether to install Stolpersteine, a decision rejected by the opinion leaders of the major faction in Lorsch’s parliament, which claimed it wasn’t respectful to step on the names of the dead. (The same reasoning is still used today in Munich, where more than 4,000 Stolpersteine sit in storage due to the city’s refusal to plant them in the street.) But Figaj wasn’t deterred. He joined the town’s Historical Society, got elected to the board, and in 2013 he prevailed in his efforts to embed the first 11 Stolpersteinededicated to two Jewish families in Lorsch, with the next 12 to be installed in March 2017.

Figaj didn’t stop there. He has gotten a lane in central Lorsch renamed Süsskindgasse in honor of Abraham Süsskind, a famous 19th century Jewish merchant from the town. He continues to give lectures and powerpoint presentations in Lorsch and its surrounding communities, using music and photography to educate people in the region about their past. He has also privately published The Photo Album of Jewish Families from Lorsch in English for Jewish families originating from Lorsch (A German edition will follow in January 2017) along with numerous articles, including “Das Ende einer Jüdischen Gemeinde in Südhessen” (“The End of a Jewish Community in South Hesse”), which describes the final days and deportation of the last Jews from Lorsch, and the 2015 essay “Debating Jewish History in Lorsch and Commemorative Work After the War.” One of his articles chronicles the burning of Lorsch’s synagogue on Kristallnacht, after which the city council tore down the building and handed bills for its destruction to the remaining Jews of the town (mostly women, as many men had been arrested to extort “agreements” to leave the town) that far exceeded the actual cost of 1,150 Reichmarks. After the war, in one case damages were claimed in court but dismissed.

Figaj’s research, writing and presentations are “stunning, revelatory and life-enhancing,” says Elaine Kahn, of West Chester, Pennsylvania, whose grandmother’s family lived in Lorsch for 200 years. “Figaj can convey his work with the artistry of the finest storytellers, and I believe the wider influence of his work will only grow with time. His credo is to unearth all the critical stories and facts still sleeping underneath a blanket of national shame which too many are still not willing to lift properly.” Lorsch’s storied Jewish past includes the grandmother of the Marx Brothers; Julius Krakauer, the composer and founder of Krakauer Brothers pianos in New York; and perhaps the most renowned Lorsch family, the Morgenthau dynasty. In March 2016, Figaj visited Robert Morgenthau in New York. During this journey, he also delivered a public lecture in Pasadena about the early business of Lazarus Morgenthau, whose profitable cigar factory in Lorsch enabled the family to emigrate to the U.S. in the 1860s.

While working to complete his book about Heinz Jost, Figaj has met Lorsch’s Jewish descendants and survivors of the Holocaust, who have helped him to compile a trove of stories and material detailing the town’s Jewish past. “The personal human contact yielded so much more information than I could have expected,” says Figaj, who works tirelessly to decipher and transcribe letters written in old-fashioned German print that is often extremely hard to understand. “We, the grandchildren, open our drawers and find things we sometimes do not want to find, which we did not know existed. You get deeper and deeper and deeper into the stories. I would say I now know [about] every Jew who ever lived in Lorsch since the Thirty Years War.”

Today, Figaj helps lead yearly commemorations of Kristallnacht, which have grown in popularity. The event formerly drew around 50 people, but “now over 200 come out on a rainy November night,” he says. In early 2017, Figaj will help bring the Fritz-Bauer Institut (Frankfurt) exhibit, “Legalisierter Raub,” touring the Hesse state since 2001 and exploring the role fiscal authorities played in robbing Jews of property during the Holocaust, to the Lorsch city museum for a three month exhibition.

Figaj recalls the town’s mayor once said to him, “You can tell us history, but I really like good and positive history,” to which Figaj responded, “History is never positive or negative. It’s history.” Now, he says, Germans “are slowly realizing that their fellow Jewish citizens’ achievements are part of their towns and part of German history, which they can be proud of.”