Persecution and Resistance in Heidelberg 1933-1945

Heidelberg was an extremely fascist city. As early as the local elections at the end of 1930, the NSDAP received the most votes with 35.7%. In the student government elections at the university in the summer semester of 1930, the far-right bloc even achieved an absolute majority. Nazi leaders therefore liked to visit Heidelberg. It is no wonder that Lord Mayor Dr. Carl Neinhaus, a member of the NSDAP, made Adolf Hitler an honorary citizen in 1933 and Dr. Joseph Goebbels in 1939. Characteristic of the citizenry at the time was that Neinhaus, elected mayor in 1928, then became a member of the National Socialists and was proposed again as a mayoral candidate by the CDU in 1952 — and was re-elected.

After Hindenburg's coup-like transfer of power to Hitler on January 30, 1933 — supported by high finance, big industry, and the old elites — the fascists swiftly began implementing their "National Socialism" program: combating and eliminating Marxists, communists, and Jews as the alleged roots of all evil, creating a Greater Germany with a population as "Aryan" as possible, and preparing for a new war of conquest. These plans could only be realized in a dictatorship. The "Government of National Uprising" held only 42% of the seats in the Reichstag (NSDAP 33%, DNVP 9%).

This was to be corrected through the Reichstag elections on March 5, 1933, using all available means of power. As early as February 28, 1933, the "Decree for the Protection of People and State" had suspended all basic rights. With promises in Hitler's propaganda speeches: "Give us four years..."; incitement against democracy—the "system"; slander of the communists as Reichstag arsonists; and massive obstruction of the election campaigns of the KPD, SAP (Socialist Workers' Party), and SPD through press bans and arrests; along with ruthless violence by the police, SA, and SS (more than 70 murders were counted nationwide), the Hitler coalition finally received 52% of the Reichstag seats. It was the last formally free election. The establishment of the Hitler dictatorship on March 23, 1933, was almost a formality: the invalidation of the 81 KPD seats, the murder and arrest of 15 SPD deputies, and pressure on the bourgeois factions were enough to force the two-thirds majority needed to seize power. Even the later Federal President Theodor Heuss voted in favor.

First the political opponents were targeted. Even before the Reichstag elections, 24 communists in Heidelberg were taken into "protective custody" for distributing election materials. After the election, a further 34 communists from Heidelberg and the surrounding area, including four women, were arrested and held in custody for several months. Working-class neighborhoods were searched for political materials and weapons; both KPD city councilors and all nine KPD council members were arrested, as were the editors of the SPD newspaper "Volksstimme" on Schröderstrasse. KPD and SPD presses were completely banned. The trade union building on Rohrbacher Strasse was stormed by the SA; eight union secretaries and the landlord were taken into protective custody, the unions were dissolved, and their assets confiscated. After the ban on parties on June 22, 1933, the three SPD mandates were also revoked, and the city council was completely "cleaned". Within the first weeks of the Nazi dictatorship, 15 worker functionaries from Heidelberg were deported to the Kislau (near Mingolsheim) and Heuberg (near Stetten am Kalten Markt) concentration camps.

By the end of March 1933, 40 Heidelberg workers' associations and organizations were banned, 62 employees were unlawfully removed from municipal services, and 14 officials were placed on leave or retired. In total, over 600 employees of municipal and state institutions were dismissed for political or racial reasons. At the university, 62 out of 206 professors, lecturers, and instructors were excluded or forced into early retirement — 30% of the entire teaching staff. Twenty-seven left-leaning students were expelled from all German universities starting in June 1933.

In 1933, 1,102 Jewish citizens lived in Heidelberg, along with another 115 of Jewish descent, making up about 1.5% of the population. After the November pogrom, Jews were completely excluded from economic life, and they could no longer earn their living. They were excluded from most professions, and their businesses and trades were boycotted. Jewish retail stores went bankrupt or had to be sold far below value. Craft businesses had to close due to a lack of orders, and wholesale businesses and Jewish factories went bankrupt or were sold. From December 1938, Jewish children were no longer allowed to attend German schools, and Jews were banned from entering cultural institutions or recreational facilities. Public transportation could no longer be used, and radios, records, bicycles, cameras, etc., had to be handed over. Since the beginning of the war on September 1, 1939, Jews were no longer allowed to be tenants in "Aryan" houses and were crammed into special Jewish houses, e.g., Bunsenstr. 19a and Landfriedstr. 14. The visible wearing of the "Jewish star" was ordered from September 1941. Finally, on October 22, 1940, at the instigation of the Gauleiters of Baden and Saarpfalz, Wagner and Bürckel, the Jewish citizens of Heidelberg were ordered to pack between 4 and 7 a.m. — only 50 pounds of luggage and 100 Reichsmark were allowed — and forced to gather in the marketplace in the morning, from where the frightened people were taken by truck to the train station. At 6:15 p.m., the deportation train with 282 women, children, and men left Heidelberg in sealed wagons (17 other Heidelberg residents were deported from elsewhere). After a four-day journey, the unfortunate arrived at a barracks camp near Gurs in the Pyrenees. In total, over 6,500 Jews from all over Baden and Saarpfalz were deported to Gurs. The health and hygienic conditions were appalling.

Fifty-five Heidelberg residents died in Gurs, 31 in other places in France, and 109 were later killed in various extermination camps in the East. Ninety-one of the deportees survived because they were able to emigrate or hide. The fate of 13 people is unknown. Sick people and their closest relatives, members of the Jewish community administration, and Jews living in mixed marriages and their children were deported in smaller transports in the following years. The "Memorial Book for the Victims of Nazi Persecution of Jews in Baden-Württemberg" lists the names of 258 Heidelberg citizens. Only a few survived in Heidelberg. In November 1945, 40 Jewish citizens still lived here. As late as February 1945, the last remaining Jews were to be deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Among them was the later Lord Mayor of Mannheim, Dr. Fritz Cahn-Garnier. A courageous Heidelberg woman, the Social Democrat Otti Winteroll, hid him in her apartment at Atzelhof for 44 days until the Americans arrived at the end of March 1945.

Jehovah's Witnesses, following their convictions, refused to give the Hitler salute, work in armaments factories, take the oath of allegiance, or perform any military service. The religious community of the Earnest Bible Students was banned; nevertheless, they distributed their writings, in which Jehovah's Witnesses were urged to remain true to their faith and act according to their biblically trained conscience, e.g., to obey God more than humans. Two of their Heidelberg members were killed in the Dachau concentration camp because of their steadfastness; another Jehovah's Witness refused military service in Russia and was executed.

At the Psychiatric-Neurobiological University Clinic in Bergheim, a branch of the Berlin Euthanasia Center, the "Euthanasia Research Center Heidelberg," had existed since early 1942 under the direction of Prof. Dr. Carl Schneider. He conducted long-term studies on epilepsy and "idiocy" and worked on a "dying order for idiots" in 1942. His assistants, Doctors Schmieder, Rauch, and Wendt, were on the payroll of the Euthanasia Center. In 1944, Schneider had 21 mentally disabled children murdered to examine their brains. A memorial stone in front of the clinic entrance has commemorated these underage victims since 1998. Carl Schneider committed suicide in December 1945 while in investigative custody, but his assistants went on to have careers after 1945.

The fates of countless homosexuals, forcibly sterilized individuals, mentally or physically disabled people, or others who did not conform to the Nazi idea of "Aryans" — labeled as "troublemakers", "asocials", "unwilling to work", "psychopaths", "aliens," "life unworthy of life", and the like — are known only in individual cases; how many of these humiliated and persecuted people lost their lives in the Heidelberg region remains largely unknown. However, a doctoral thesis conducted in 2003 identified 226 patients of the Psychiatric University Clinic who were transferred between 1936 and 1945 to the "Wiesloch Healing and Care Institution" and murdered in the killing centers Grafeneck and Hadamar.

During the war years, thousands of prisoners of war and forced laborers were crammed into numerous makeshift accommodations and barracks in Heidelberg under mostly appalling conditions; the city archive records 27,000 individual cases. They had to work in factories, trades, farms, and for the city of Heidelberg without or with minimal pay and inadequate food and medical care. There were many deaths and executions for minor offenses. For example, a resident witnessed the hanging of five forced laborers in the courtyard of the Fuchs wagon factory. In Heidelberg's cemeteries, at least 327 graves of prisoners of war, deported foreigners, and their children were counted, 171 of them unnamed. A memorial plaque on the cemetery of honor bears the inscription: "Here rest in a common urn grave 177 Polish, Soviet, and Yugoslavian dead from the year 1945." On the Kirchheim cemetery, a memorial plaque states: "Here rest 34 Polish and 20 Soviet dead from the war year 1944". Only in recent years have former forced laborers received minimal compensation.

Shortly before the liberation, four young German soldiers were hanged in Heidelberg because they no longer wanted to fight—two in Rohrbacher Strasse and two at the exit of Handschuhsheim. Alexander Mitscherlich reports:

Completely disorganized, hundreds of young soldiers passed by us. They had lost or abandoned contact with their units, willingly or not. At the same time, the last SS units, who could not comprehend that the end of the Third Reich was at hand, tried to stop the flood of refugees through court-martials and executions. On the northern exit road from Heidelberg... you could now see two young soldiers hanging from apple trees as an example meant to deter... The judge who ordered the execution of the perhaps 17-year-old boys remained in office after the war, as a professor of criminal law. The scene becomes even more eerie when you learn that this judge was by no means a Nazi but simply a "professional inhuman" being who thought he was making way for "justice."