Since 1998, a memorial at the former rural synagogue of Roth has honoured the fate of the Jews from the Marburg-Biedenkopf county during the Holocaust. The SS deported many of the town's Jewish residents to the Theresienstadt and Riga ghettos in 1941/1942.
History
The Hessian township of Roth – today a district of Weimar (Lahn) – was a centre of Jewish life in the 18th century. 13 Jewish families lived here around 1737. Until 1870, the village was the seat of the Roth, Fronhausen and Lohra synagogue community. Apart from the synagogue, Roth was also home to a religious school for the children of Jewish families. The Jewish community had over 30 members around 1933. After the National Socialists took power in Germany, Roth too became the scene of violent attacks of members of the NSDAP against Jews. During the »Kristallnacht« in November 1938, members of the NSDAP broke into the Roth synagogue and destroyed its interior completely. The building was not set on fire in order to protect the neighbouring farmhouses. At the beginning of 1939, the authorities forced the Jewish community to sell the synagogue. Residents of Roth then used the building as a carpenter's shop and later for grain storage. Several of the Jewish residents had emigrated to the US and to South Africa by then. The 15 Jews who had remained in Roth were deported to the Theresienstadt and Riga ghettos by the SS.
Victims
In 1941/1942, the SS deported the 15 Jewish residents of the village to the Theresienstadt and Riga ghettos. None of them survived the Holocaust. Three Jewish families from Roth saw themselves forced to emigrate in order to escape National Socialist repressions.
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
Between 1990 and 1998, the derelict synagogue building was restored in several steps. In 1995, the district committee of the county of Marburg-Biedenkopf purchased the building for a symbolic price. The district committee then made the renovation of the synagogue's interior possible, which was adapted for exhibition purposes. Many traces of the damages inflicted upon the synagogue were left in their original state. In 1996, the women's bath, the mikvah, was partially uncovered as part of a school project. In 1997, the county transferred the use of the building to the »Working Group Rural Synagogue of Roth«. Its goal is to preserve the memory of the Jews who were murdered, and to cultivate contacts with surviving members of the former Jewish community. The association now uses the former synagogue as an educational and cultural centre. In 2006, the members of the »Working Group Rural Synagogue of Roth« were awarded the first ever support Prize for Hessian Local History.
Possibilities
Guided tours, readings, joint projects with schools and the University of Marburg (writing workshop, educational materials for teachers, display of school projects), cultural events on the theme of Judaism in the Middle Ages
Open
May to September: 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. on the first and third Sunday of each month and by appointment.
