The tour started at the Dom (Catholic Cathedral) because originally the Jewish people were invited to the city by the Archbishop. They were the money handlers of the day.
The Mikwe, ritual bath, from the Middle Ages now has modern stairs down to the flowing water. At that time the street level was that low.
It seems almost every German city has a Judengasse, a Jewish alley. Here it intersects with the Pfaffengasse, the preachers' alley.
Our young Jewish guide stopped at many stores and told/showed us which Jewish family owned it before it was confiscated by the Nazis, and what kind of a business they had. We learned that in WWI the young Jewish men fought bravely and got many medals including the Iron Cross, but none were ever allowed to become officers.
At the end of the tour she showed us pictures of the burning of the synagogue on Nov. 9, 1938 - the Night of Broken Glass, or as Germans call it "Kristallnacht".
We got a tour of the new synagogue and a description of how their worship services are run. This is a rather conservative synagogue, with most members coming in the last years from Russia. They don't have their own rabbi. The women sit separated by a curtain and our guide said most of the time they visit with each other and don't pay attention. Different!
Jack and I had to run to catch our train to Mannheim, across the river from LU. Here we found our way to this school in the suburb of Sandhofen
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It's a cheerful place with groupings of huge pencils every few yards of fence around it. But in the basement is a small but thorough museum of the Außenlager KZ (outlying concentration camp) that was in this building from 9/27/44 until end of the war in May 1945.
Every few months the historical archivist gives a tour. It was 2 hours long and we learned a lot.
This is a picture of the building before 1913. So you can see that even though it was large, the men were cramped in the rooms which just held bunkbeds. There were over 1000 and most of them came from Poland.
In fact, the head of Daimler Benz asked the SS for new inmates who were strong enough to work in their factory, where they were producing trucks for the war effort. He was told to report to the Dachau KZ (concentration camp) near Munich and select his own 1060 workers. He and an assistant did this and chose a group that had recently come from Poland. So unlike most KZs where the Nazis tried to mix types of people, different countries, languages and so on, in this one men knew each other from back home. The SS soon imported the worst guards because the men were too friendly towards each other.
The men were given the same food as soldiers, but because the SS sold so much of it to the local population, the prisoners hardly got anything. In spite of this they had to run every morning from the school building to the Mercedes plant. After a 12 hour shift they ran home.
Our tour guide said that people often assume that because it was the last year of the war, it couldn't have been too bad for the prisoners. Far from true!
Daimler Benz became uncomfortable that when the war ended they would be accountable for these sickly workers. So they asked the SS to send them away - since they also weren't productive any more.
Some were put on trains to Dachau KZ, but others joined other KZ prisoners in a death march to Buchenwald.
13 million people became forced laborers in Germany. In Mannheim alone they counted 142 businesses that used these prisoners, but now with more research he told us, they think it was up to 300.
There were many of these smaller concentration camps that organizationally belonged to a larger one. No one had identified Sandhofen as one until a history teacher (Peter Koppenhöfer) in this school discovered this history. He found a Polish forced labor prisoner who had stayed in the area working for the U.S. army after the war. This amazing teacher began researching and interviewing. He even learned Polish so that he could get their stories down on paper.
The youngest were four 14 year olds.
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