The 20th century started promisingly for the Jewish Community in Munich, which had grown considerably due to an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe. However, this migration was due not only to the general poverty in their countries of origin but also to recurring eruptions of violence against Jews in Poland and Russia. The relationship between the non-assimilated ‘eastern Jews’ and the assimilated Jews from the western countries was not always free of conflict. The western Jews feared, for example, that the traditionally dressed, Yiddish-speaking eastern Jews would spark an increase in antisemitism on account of their outlandish appearance.
There were waves of antisemitism even after the First World War, in which the service rendered by Jewish soldiers had been documented in the so-called ‘census of Jews’. ‘The Jews’ were held responsible not only for the wartime defeat of the Wilhelmine Empire but also for the revolution. The establishment of a decidedly antisemitic political party, the German Workers’ Party (DAP), in Munich, the agitation of right-wing extremist organizations such as the German Protection and Defiance Federation, the publication of the antisemitic newspaper Völkischer Beobachter (initially twice a week, then daily), the mass rallies in Munich at which Adolf Hitler gave speeches blaming ‘the Jews’ for the world war, economic woes and all other misfortunes: all this was writing on the wall and created a climate of simmering violence that was fueled by the policies of the right-wing conservative Bavarian government. The ‘Eastern Jew campaign’ instigated by the political right wing in the early 1920s, for example, deliberately targeted immigrants from Eastern Europe. In Munich, some 1500 people came from areas that now belonged to the Bolshevist Soviet Union and were therefore alleged to be ‘Communist elements’, who posed a threat to the state. The Aliens’ Decree subsequently promulgated by State Premier Gustav von Kahr in 1920 facilitated their expulsion and hindered the entry of other ‘Eastern Jews’, who were to be prevented from crossing the border into Bavaria.
Anyone who could not be expelled immediately was sent to a transit camp in Ingolstadt, where foreigners were locked up before being deported. While the majority of the deportation orders were canceled when Munich’s Jewish Community intervened with the Bavarian Interior Ministry, Munich’s antisemitic chief of police Ernst Pöhner instructed the police to demand proof from immigrants that they had never been members of the Communist Party.
Members of the Jewish community had been victims of antisemitic riots since the beginning of the 1920s. The community’s rabbi Leo Baerwald and members of the Munich branch of the Centralverein were shouted down at a Nazi Party assembly in Munich on September 30, 1920. Councilor of Commerce Sigmund Fraenkel, a leading figure in the Centralverein and Munich’s orthodox community, was severely maltreated on the tram on June 21, 1923 along with his son. Berlin-based sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld was beaten unconscious after a lecture in Munich on October 4 that same year.
The Völkischer Beobachter constantly agitated against Jewish business owners, who were most commonly accused of ‘usury’ and ‘racketeering’. Swastikas were daubed on Jewish-owned stores in Munich from 1921 onwards, while the synagogues in Herzog-Max-Straße and Herzog-Rudolf-Straße were defaced with antisemitic slogans in 1921 and 1923. The Nazis deliberately sought out well-known Jewish meeting places such as the Café Deutsches Theater on Schwanthalerstraße and the Jewish soup kitchen on Klenzestraße to cause disturbances and abuse Jewish people. The antisemitic attacks became so violent that in 1923, a Jewish delegation from the Association of Bavarian Israelite Communities complained to Bavarian State Premier Eugen von Knilling about the lack of protection by the authorities. Gustav von Kahr was appointed State Commissioner with dictatorial powers that September and continued his policy of expelling Jews. This campaign in the fall of 1923 affected 180 Jewish families, many of whom had lived in Munich for decades.
Although the Weimar Constitution granted Jews the same rights as other citizens, the SA’s readiness to employ violence severely restricted the opportunities for Jewish participation in public life from the early 1920s on. This was because they had to reckon with civil disturbances as soon as they left their homes. These violent attacks reached their first peak in 1923. During the Hitler Putsch, Jews were deliberately taken hostage and imprisoned in the basement of the Nazi Party’s main headquarters. The perpetrators had found their private addresses in the Munich address book. In the mid-1920s, cemeteries and synagogues were targeted in a wave of desecrations; towards the end of the decade, cases involving the abuse of Jews by the SA became increasingly common. Despite the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe, the Jewish Community was also shrinking due to the aging population, declining birth rates, emigration, and the departure of many Jews from the community as a result of ‘mixed marriages’ with persons of other faiths. In 1925, there were 10,068 people living in Munich who professed to be Jewish; by 1933, there were only 9005 (census results).
The Israelite Religious Community had had both a council (24 persons) and an executive committee (10 persons) since 1919. Jewish women and foreigners were also entitled to vote provided they had been living in Munich for more than five years. In 1928, the statutes were changed and all Jews were granted an active right to vote provided they had been a member of the community for one year and living in Germany for three years. In order to stand for election, they needed to have been living in Munich for three years.
Inflation and economic crises also caused problems for the Israelite Religious Community. Subsidies for Hebrew courses, the Jewish religious school, and the prayer rooms for Eastern European Jews were cut, and the expansion of the Jewish school run by the orthodox Ohel Jakob Association was halted. Most of the Jewish associations had local groups in Munich that influenced the city’s cultural and social life. The Zionist newspaper Das Jüdische Echo was published in Munich, as was the Bayerische Israelitische Gemeindezeitung (from 1937: Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt für den Verband der Kultusgemeinden in Bayern (Jewish Community Newsletter for the Association of Religious Communities in Bavaria).
When Hitler came to power, he was able to build on the resentment festering in large parts of the non-Jewish population and the hatred long stoked by Nazi propaganda. The Nazi laws and ordinances initially aimed to exclude Jews from social, cultural, and economic life. The anti-violence and anti-boycott protests mounted by the community under its chairman Alfred Neumeyer, e.g. after the bodies of Jewish inmates were transferred from Dachau Concentration Camp, brought no result. Heinrich Himmler had the Bavarian Political Police target Jewish organizations, which had already been searched for ‘subversive materials’ as early as May 1933. Although some associations were permitted to resume their activities a few weeks later, the fear of further official arbitrariness remained. For the most part, the community’s work turned inwards and focused on welfare and support for emigrants. Between 1933 and 1938, discrimination and marginalization caused more than 3500 Jews to move away from Munich; more than 3000 of them went abroad, mostly to Palestine and the U.S. Information on the number of Jews living in Munich during the early years of the Third Reich varies; in April 1938, the police headquarters claimed that there were 8799.
The demolition of Munich’s main synagogue in the summer of 1938 and the rioting during the pogrom of November 9-10, 1938 , with the burning down of the synagogue on Herzog-Rudolf-Straße and the destruction of the synagogue on Reichenbachstraße, were the most flagrant attacks on Jewish life, the practice of religion, and the architectural manifestations of Jewish presence in the city. Jewish-owned businesses were looted and demolished, money was extorted from affluent Jews in Munich, merchant Joachim Both was killed by SA men in Lindwurmstraße, and 24 Jewish men – at least two of whom were members of Munich’s Jewish Community – lost their lives in Dachau Concentration Camp, while two more died shortly after being released. Although the pogrom left many Jews destitute, and despite being forced to sell their property during the course of the ‘Aryanization‘ program, they were still excluded from public welfare.
After the unbridled terror, the Jews remaining in Munich tried to emigrate. However, advanced age and a lack of financial resources significantly limited the opportunities for emigration, as the potential host countries were primarily interested in wealthy or young and well-qualified immigrants. Harassment made everyday life more difficult: shopping was only permitted at certain times in certain stores, and the use of public transport was forbidden even though the stores and workplaces were often far away. More and more members of the dwindling community were conscripted for forced labor, evicted from their homes, and made to move into ‘Jew houses‘ and barracks. Community life became increasingly difficult. After the pogrom, the community was integrated into the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, membership of which was compulsory. Neumeyer’s successor from 1941 was Karl Stahl, who died at Auschwitz.
The outbreak of war made emigration increasingly difficult. The results of the census showed that in May 1939, there were still 4940 people living in Munich whom the Nazis classified as ‘full Jews’ (including 4407 so-called ‘religious Jews’); by the middle of 1941, the number had shrunk to around 3300. The ‘star of David’ was introduced as mandatory identification for all Jews in September 1941, followed by a ban on all emigration in October 1941. If they were to survive in hiding, Jewish people needed the help of reliable non-Jews who were willing to run risks, which meant that this option was only available to a very few. Only those who lived in so-called ‘mixed marriages’ or whose ancestors were not all Jewish, i.e. the so-called ‘half-Jews’ or ‘quarter-Jews’, were safe from deportation. The deportations were the interface between the customary persecution of Jews by means of antisemitic propaganda, discrimination, marginalization and riots, and their mass murder by the Nazis. According to current research (2015), there were 35 deportations between November 20, 1941 and February 23, 1945 transporting almost 3500 people from Munich. The very first transport on November 20, 1941, led straight to extermination: on November 25, 1941, almost 1000 Jews deported from Munich to Kaunas, Lithuania, were murdered in mass shootings by members of ‘Mobile Killing Squad’ no. 3 under SS Regiment Leader Karl Jäger. Other transports took deportees to Piaski (near Lublin), Auschwitz, and Theresienstadt. The chances of survival were minimal: of the approx. 1340 Jews taken from Munich to Theresienstadt, only 160 survived.
After the Holocaust, Jewish life in Munich appeared to have been eradicated forever. Although around 400 of Munich’s Jews had survived in ‘mixed marriages’ and a few eventually returned from Theresienstadt, the survivors were often elderly, sick, and scarred from years of imprisonment or living in fear – whether underground or as a ‘Jewish half-breed’ or partner in a ‘mixed marriage’, both of whom were objects of discrimination. Yet a development that had already begun in the last year of the war was to bring about a kind of renaissance for the Jewish Community in Munich. Although the Reich had been declared ‘Jew-free’ in 1943, numerous Eastern European Jews came to Bavaria in 1944/1945 to work on Nazi armaments projects deploying Jewish inmates from Dachau and Flossenbürg Concentration Camps as labor. After the end of the war, Jews from the countries behind the Iron Curtain fled to the U.S. Occupation Zone, since the American military government offered surviving Jews the greatest security of all the four Allies and also granted them comparatively generous benefits. As a result, the number of Jewish people in Bavaria at the end of the war actually exceeded the number in the early days of the Third Reich: in 1933, more than 35,000 Jews lived in Bavaria (excluding the Palatinate region), while in 1947, there were more than 57,000 Jewish refugees in the Munich district alone. Between 1945 and 1951, some 120,000 Jews passed through the city, which had become home to numerous international Jewish aid organizations including the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Bavaria, which served as a mouthpiece for the survivors. In Munich, the Yiddish language experienced a brief renaissance: Eastern European survivors wrote their memoirs in Yiddish, the Yiddish weekly newspaper Unzer Weg was published between 1945 and 1950, and historical commissions collected material at the displaced persons’ camps.
Although most Jews wanted to leave Munich and Germany as soon as possible after the end of the war in order to build new lives overseas or in Israel, a few of them decided to stay in or near Munich. The reasons why they postponed their emigration or ultimately gave up on the idea varied widely: sometimes they stayed for love of a non-Jewish German person, sometimes they wished to stay far away from the antisemitic uprisings in Eastern Europe, sometimes they were deterred by the uncertain future they would face in other countries.
The new Jewish Community of the postwar period was established in 1945 by Theresienstadt survivor Julius Spanier with the help of attorney Siegfried Neuland. Spanier was the community’s chairman until 1951, when he was succeeded by Siegfried Neuland. After the obliteration of community life and the destruction of the synagogues during the Third Reich, the first priority was to rebuild the community and erect a new synagogue. 1947 saw the reopening of the Agudas Achim synagogue in Reichenbachstraße, which had been ransacked and destroyed by bombs during the pogrom of 1938. The reconstruction work also encompassed the building of several smaller synagogues, a retirement home and ritual bath, a nursery, and an elementary school, as well as the re-establishment of a lively social and cultural life. Two Jewish weekly newspapers, the Münchner Jüdischen Nachrichten and Neue Jiddische Zeitung, began providing news and information for community members in the early 1950s. By the mid-1970s, Munich had the third-largest Jewish Community in Germany after Berlin and Frankfurt am Main. More than 90 percent of its members had been born outside Germany.
However, attacks on the Jewish Community had not become a thing of the past: in 1970, seven people died in an arson attack on the Jewish retirement home, while the synagogue on Reichenbachstraße was attacked that same year and damage inflicted on the Torah ark and various religious objects. In 1972, the community was shaken by the murders of eleven members of the Israeli team during the Olympic Games. Fear and uncertainty were the result. However, it was deemed vital not to sacrifice the rich tradition, history and life of the Jewish Community to terror. The postwar presidents of the Israelite Religious Community, Julius Spanier, Fritz (Siegfried) Neuland, Maximilian Tauchner, Hans Lamm, and Charlotte Knobloch, all Holocaust survivors, espoused the community’s cause with courage and skill. Since the 1990s, the new Jewish Community has grown to approx. 9500 members and found a new center on Jakobsplatz. The construction of a new community center with the synagogue and the Jewish Museum emphasize that Jewish life has again gained a firm foothold in the heart of Munich despite the Holocaust and the attempts to destroy Jewish culture.
