Raise Your Voice and be a Light

I. TÜBINGEN BEGS FORGIVENESS!

Tübingen is a former Nazi city. Today, the March of Life movement originates from here, which to date has been able to mobilize tens of thousands in 370 cities and 20 nations to raise their voices against antisemitism and for Israel. In 2011 and 2015, the March of Life was honored by the Israeli Knesset for its special efforts on behalf of Holocaust survivors. The Jewish Community in Halle presented it with the Emil-L.-Fackenheim Prize for Tolerance and Understanding.

The first March of Life took place in 2007. It was very unusual. The descendants of the perpetrators in Germany no longer wanted to remain silent in the face of antisemitism and Jew hatred. They started telling their family stories, and asked forgiveness for the guilt incurred by their ancestors. The March was the first time for them to actually meet survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants; and they discovered that even more than 50 years after the end of World War II they still had to live under the shadow and with the pain of the Holocaust. The children and grandchildren of the perpetrators wanted to break their parents' and grandparents' silence. "Tubingen Begs Forgiveness" was the headline on the front page of the Jerusalem Post. Here you can read the background to this story.1

The small university town of Tübingen is situated in Southern Germany, about 30 minutes from Stuttgart. It is a typical German town with old, medieval houses and a river slowly winding its way along the picturesque house fronts. On warm summer days the students sit along the river walls, watching the long punts go by, stoked along by long poles like the gondolas in Venice. Actually, Tübingen is the typical image of a German idyll. Hardly any of the many tourists have any notion that this pretty town has such an ugly and dark history of antisemitism and used to be one of the ideological trailblazers during the Nazi era.

I want to underline this with a few facts, so you can get a better idea of what this means. In the more than 1,400 years of Tübingen's history, prior to their deportation in 1942 there had only ever been a period of 120 years that any Jews were allowed to live in the city. Their life of suffering is one long story of persecution, pogroms, and repeated expulsions. In 1477, Duke Eberhard the Bearded, an outspoken antisemite, founded the University of Tübingen. With the founding of the university, he expelled all Jews from the city and the entire region for the following 400 years. It was only in the mid eighteen hundreds that the Jews slowly started returning to the city. They built a beautiful synagogue in the city center which was first vandalized and later burnt down during Kristallnacht. Most members of the Jewish community were deported. During the Nazi era, Tübingen University paved the ideological way for the "final solution of the Jewish question" and produced the majority of the fanatic pioneers and the most efficient mass murderers who served in the front lines of the SS Einsatzgruppen and Sicherheitsdienst (intelligence service), working on the so-called final solution.

The Tübingen orientalist and indiologist Jakob Wilhelm Hauer (1881 - 1962) became head of the university's newly established Aryan Institute in 1935. His private secretary, Paul Zapp, organized mass executions in Romania, in the Ukraine, and in Russia. Theodor Dannecker, a native citizen of Tübingen, was responsible for the deportation of Jews from France and Hungary to Auschwitz. Taking everything into account, there are estimates that at least 700,000 Jews were cruelly murdered by the hand of SS mass murderers from Tübingen.

Tübingen's shared guilt in the Holocaust cast a dark shadow over our city. But there is no darkness so great that it could not be overcome by the light of God. My city is a living testimony for this.

Like many others of the post-war generation, I was deeply ashamed of my nation. Loving Germany as a country to me was nationalistic, backward, and simply unthinkable. At the same time, I had felt an inner connection to Israel ever since I had been a teenager. Even in my first lessons as a believer, I had been taught that the people of Israel was chosen. Since then, this has become a special treasure to me. I do not know why I never talked to anybody about it; but I tried to keep my inner connection to Israel a secret. There was an inner indifference in me which I was later to find again in my city's history. The same inner indifference had been the mark of the silent majority among the German population, who during the Nazi era had simply stood by, watching how their Jewish neighbors were robbed, degraded, and deported. Without this silent majority, the Shoah in Nazi Germany and with it our city's terrible story could never have taken place.

The story of the transformation of our city and of the beginnings of the March of Life is short in the telling. During a time of crisis, one thing became a spiritual key for us as a church: "The silence of your fathers still is within you!" What this was actually saying, was, "There is a silence within you that makes you just as passive, indifferent, and conformist as the people during the Nazi era." Was it possible that even 50 years after the end of World War II we were still living under the shadow of the Holocaust?

See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the Lord rises upon you and his glory appears over you. (Is 60:2)

This surely also was one of the reasons why working through the city's Nazi past was such tedious work and had only just begun in the early 80ies. In post-war Germany, people were easily classified as either perpetrators or conformists. Nonetheless, even convicted war criminals tended to receive so much backing from highest political ranks that many times they were released prematurely from prison, re-socialized and even reintegrated into social life again. There were hardly any clear confessions and admitting of guilt. All who managed to be classified as conformists were rehabilitated. And so a heavy dark curtain was drawn over the sin of the past.

The working through of the past and the denazification process at the university turned out to be a total disaster. 85% of the professors who had been either dismissed or suspended longerterm achieved their rehabilitation within the first ten years and the majority of them returned to the university. For almost 30 years, they remained silent or even lied. The generation who had incurred guilt largely managed to repress all shaming or criminal events. After 1945, everything connected to the Nazi time was subjected to silence, repression, and a disgraceful haggling over Jewish possessions misappropriated by the tax authorities.2 You can easily imagine that it was not exactly helpful for working through the city's Nazi past when a former SA Standartenführer (equivalent to Colonel) and Nazi diplomat, who had been involved in the deportation of 59,000 Jews in Slovakia, was elected as mayor. He remained in office for many years and was even made an honorary citizen. Hans Gmelin won almost 55% of the votes in 1954, despite his past. Obviously, for the majority of the voters, his brown past was more of a recommendation than a reproach. Gmelin remained in office for 25 years and by virtue of his office decisively formed the way the past was dealt with. In Tübingen, he became a key figure of repression and political silence.3

It had been only three years when my wife and I came to Tübingen in 1982 that a memorial plaque had been set up "In Memory of the Persecution and Murder of Jewish Fellow Citizens". For decades, only the remains of an old garden fence had commemorated the former synagogue. It was only in 2000 that a memorial was established at the site of the synagogue to honor the Jews from Tübingen as a "Place Against Forgetting".4

One day whilst strolling through Tübingen, we came across a memorial plaque in the city center commemorating the returning war veterans of WWII. Among those honored, as I mentioned previously, were two lawfully convicted war criminals who had been responsible for the deportation and death of thousands of Jews. Only 21 years later, in 2003, this memorial plaque was removed.5

In the mid-60's, critical students at the university sparked a drawn-out process of working through its past that was slowly advanced through a series of lectures, essays, and books. With the recent publication of a detailed, 1200 page anthology6 by a team of scholars from Tübingen University on "Tübingen University During National Socialism" the university has comprehensively worked through its history.7 And even eight years on, researching the past has not stopped:

In spring 2016, a historic trail on National Socialism opened in Tübingen. In 16 significant locations, there are 16 pillars now throughout the old city that provide information on Tübingen's history between 1933 and 1945.8

Tübingen's most renowned fraternity "Roigel" publicly apologized for the discrimination and disenfranchisement of Jews during the Nazi era. Among the signatories were famous professors from Tübingen. They titled their declaration, "We no longer want to remain silent!" The Nazi criminals and executioners from Tübingen, Erich Ehrlinger and Rudolf Bilfinger, had been among the members of this fraternity. Ehrlinger had...