Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Werner Schäfer 

Frankenthal, Rhineland-Palatinate

Werner Schäfer was born and raised next door to the old Jewish cemetery of Frankenthal, a city of 50,000 outside Mannheim, and recalls often walking through the cemetery on his way into town, although “as a child I looked at the old stones and I didn’t understand it was a Jewish cemetery, I just saw it as a cemetery.” Schäfer’s parents had been active members of the Socialist Workers Youth and had instilled in him strong social justice and human rights values. When Schäfer was 12 years old his mother died shortly after giving him a copy of The Yellow Star, an experience that impacted him deeply.

“My mother told me very often about the time of the Nazis,” Schäfer says, and “this was one of the first books where I could read what had really happened. In school there was no mention of it. Everything I learned about the Holocaust, I learned myself.”

More than 30 years later, in 1992, Schäfer, an art and technical designer who served as senior manager of media production at KSB Aktiengesellschaft, helped found the Fördervereins für jüdisches Gedenken Frankenthal (the Foundation for Jewish Remembrance in Frankenthal) to resuscitate his city’s Jewish past. Since then, he has worked tirelessly to educate students and residents about former Jewish life in Frankenthal, to document and preserve artifacts from the city’s once vibrant Jewish community, and to share his knowledge with the descendants of those who fled or were killed in the Holocaust.

“I think it’s very, very important to remember what happened under the Nazis when citizens from Frankenthal— Jewish people, who were the citizens just like the Protestants or Catholics—were called Untermenschen and killed,” says Schäfer. “My motivation is to fight against this history.”

As part of that effort, Schäfer, who spent 15 years on the Frankenthal City Council, took it upon himself to investigate the city’s archives, retrieve old newspaper photos, and collect information about Jewish businesses and family histories, which he compiled into a vast collection of documents chronicling the town’s former Jewish community. He then converted his painstaking research into DVDs, which he donated to the Leo Baeck Institute where they are preserved as the “Werner Schäfer Collection.” Among other discoveries, Schäfer uncovered letters written between Nazis and Jewish business owners that revealed surprising stories; for example, “after the war, Jews came to the city and asked for their property and money back, and the same man who had taken money away from the Jews was the one to give it back to them, and we have the complete documentation of these families” written on 130 pages of correspondence, which Schäfer uses to educate residents about their city’s past.

Thanks to Schäfer’s dedicated work, there are more than 60 Stolpersteine installed outside former Jewish homes and businesses in Frankenthal, with five more scheduled to be planted in March of 2016. He also helped erect a memorial stone outside the city’s former synagogue, which was burnt on Kristallnacht, bombed during the war, and later rebuilt as a cinema.

“The foundation gives an opportunity to young people and school children to open their eyes and to think about what happened,” says Schäfer, who manages the website Jews In Frankenthal (www.juden-in-frankenthal.de) and has also provided articles for Alemannia Judaica (www.alemannia-judaica.de/frankenthal_synagoge.htm), which informs researchers, teachers and families around the world engaged in learning about the town’s Jewish legacy. Driven by an uncompromising desire to tell the truth, he says he “can still feel anti-Semitism from people, and when I hear it, I give them information— I tell them what I think.”

In addition, Schäfer has worked exhaustively to restore and document Frankenthal’s old Jewish cemetery, which the Nazis destroyed, and which looked like “a jungle, where the roots of trees were pushing up the gravestones at odd angles,” he recalls. Schäfer recorded histories of the families and individuals buried there, and with the help of a colleague from Mainz, helped translate the gravestones from Hebrew into German. In 2012, Schäfer organized a team of locals and international volunteers from Georgia, Azerbaijan and Russia who worked for two weeks cleaning the cemetery so “now it’s grassy, it’s clean, and you can see all the gravestones… including the cemetery’s oldest gravestone, from 1826, which has been repaired,” says Schäfer, who continues to lead tours of the cemetery and organize student volunteers who come to clean it.

Schäfer’s work with students doesn’t stop there. In addition to guiding visitors through the city’s historic Jewish places, he has brought students into his work by involving them in the research, design and production of banners and posters for exhibitions installed at the town hall, local museums and schools. He has also organized and accompanied numerous student field trips to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in France, just west of Strasbourg.

Rabbi Peter H. Schweitzer, at the City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism in New York City, says he contacted Schäfer to find out about his great-grandfather Isaac Schweitzer, who once owned a prominent business on Frankenthal’s town square. Because Schäfer had worked “endlessly and selflessly to preserve the local Jewish history and pass on his knowledge to other people,” Schweitzer was able to track down his family roots in Bavaria and Württemberg and produce a family history based on family letters Schäfer helped him to uncover. Passionate to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive, says Schäfer, “I hope that it never ever happens again. Only when one knows what happened in the past can one find the right way to avoid it happening again.”