Since November 9, 2018, a memorial in Lüneburg, located on the former site of the synagogue, has commemorated the building and the 200 men and women of the former Jewish community who fled, were expelled, deported or murdered.
History
The first evidence of Jewish life in Lüneburg on the Ilmenau river dates back to the 13th century. After 1680, a small community gradually began to form, growing to 13 families by 1850 and numbering over 127 members by 1871 – the year of German unification. On 1 December 1892, the foundation stone was laid for a prayer hall with 200 seats, funded by individual Jewish families and designed by the city architect Richard Krampf (1859–1919). On June 6, 1894, the synagogue was inaugurated with a solemn service attended by the Chief Rabbi, the city’s mayor, representatives of the churches and political officials. The first prayer in the synagogue was dedicated to the German Emperor and the royal family. Following the National Socialists’ seizure of power on 30 January 1933, the marginalisation of the nearly 200 Jews began. Due to flight and expulsion, their number had fallen to 39 by Agust 1, 1938. The community leaders were forced to sell the property – at a price far below market value – to the Chamber of Industry and Commerce, and had to pay for the demolition of the building. The last service took place on October 23, 1938. During the anti-Jewish state terror on the night of November 9–10, 1938, the two remaining Jewish-run shops in Lüneburg were vandalised. There are reports that windows of the disused synagogue were smashed and window frames set alight. In 1941, the town took over the site and had a children’s playground built there. In the 1950s, the Lutheran Regional Church acquired the land and, in 1955, built the regional superintendent’s office there.
Victims
The memorial commemorates the synagogue that was demolished in 1938, the more than 170 members of the congregation who fled or were expelled during the Nazi era, and – by name – 24 victims of the so-called »euthanasia« programme and the Holocaust from Lüneburg.
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
After the end of the war in 1945, around 600 survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp found refuge in Lüneburg. They established a new Jewish community, which was dissolved in 1959. In 1950, the community erected a memorial stone on the site of the former synagogue. In 2018 – 80 years after its forced sale – a memorial was established on the initiative of the Association of Christian-Jewish Cooperation and based on plans by the architect Carl-Peter von Mansberg, with the memorial stone at its centre. On the interior walls, plaques commemorate the victims of the so-called »euthanasia« programme and the Holocaust, as well as Jewish families who were expelled from the town. The inauguration took place on November 9, 2018 in the presence of descendants of Lüneburg’s Jewish community.
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