In 1998, a monument was dedicated in Bielefeld, located in East Westphalia, in memory of the several thousands of Jews from Bielefeld and vicinity who were deported to concentration and extermination camps from 1941 on.
History
Bielefeld lies in the region of East Westphalia (German: Ostwestfalen), just north of the Teutoburg Forest. Jews settled in Bielefeld already in the 14th century. The Jewish community expanded significantly in the 19th century, although it remained numerically rather small. In 1933, there were about 800 Jews in Bielefeld, which had a total population of about 121,000.
After their rise to power, the National Socialists began to systematically discriminate against the Jews and exclude them from society. Jews were mobbed out of their professions, many were forced to shut down their businesses. Only about 80 of the more than 150 Jewish shops and businesses in Bielefeld were still open in the summer of 1938. They became the target of the National Socialists during the »Kristallnacht« in November 1938. On November 12, the National Socialists deported 406 Jews – of whom 40 to 50 came from Bielefeld – from the Bielefeld main station to the Buchenwald concentration camp. While they were released a few weeks later, many Bielefeld Jews decided to emigrate in the aftermath; the last four Jewish businesses were »aryanized« in 1939. In 1941, the National Socialists began deporting Jews from the German Reich to ghettos and extermination camps in the occupied East. The first deportation from Bielefeld took place on December 13, 1941: Jewish families from Bielefeld and what are today the counties of Ostwestfalen-Lippe and Schaumburg-Lippe were forced to board trains already packed with Jews from Münster and Westfalen. About 420 Jews from the area of Bielefeld were deported on that day. In total, deportation trains bound for ghettos and camps stopped at the Bielefeld main station nine times between 1941 and 1945, picking up Jews from the town and surrounding areas.
Victims
About 420 Jews were deported from Bielefeld. Only a few more than 60 survived the persecution, deportation and mass murder carried out by the National Socialists. A total of 1,840 Jewish men, women and children were deported from the whole region, from Minden county, from Lippe and from Schaumburg-Lippe.
The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority.
With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany.
Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war.
In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives.
Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals.
The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.
Remembrance
The memorial entitled »Each Murdered Person has a Name« was dedicated on the square in front of the Bielefeld main station on August 16, 1998. The peace group of the Altstadt church community had initiated the creation of the memorial in 1996, and the project was consequently implemented with the help of volunteer work and donations. Architect Hartmut Falkenberg designed the memorial on a honorary basis: Engraved on two stylized metal lecterns are the names of 1,840 Jews from Bielefeld, the Minden district, from Lippe and from Schaumburg-Lippe. They were all deported from the Bielefeld train station. A further inscription contains Psalm 78.6 in Hebrew and in German: »So the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children.«
