Square of the Old Synagogue

Platz der Alten Synagoge

Since 2017, a mirror of water remembers the Old Synagogue in Freiburg, destroyed in November 1938.

History

In 1120 Freiburg was granted town rights. Jews were already living in Freiburg in the 13th century. In 1349, at the height of the plague epidemic, almost all the Jews of Freiburg were burned alive. Later Jews lived in the city again, but they were finally expelled in 1424, so that Jews did not live there again until 400 years later.
The new community was officially founded in 1863. At first it used a small prayer room but already in 1869/1870 it built its own synagogue in the city centre. It was built in Moorish-Byzantine style with Romanesque elements on an almost square ground plan. Next to the synagogue a community hall was also built. In the mid-1920s the façade of the synagogue was changed when a porch was added. At that time, about 1,400 Jews lived in Freiburg, out of a total population of about 90,000. Many Jewish families were involved in trade, but there were also many Jewish doctors, lawyers and university lecturers in the university town of Freiburg.
After the Nazis came to power, the situation of the Jews in Freiburg deteriorated noticeably. Many chose the path of emigration. On November 10, 1938 local members of the SA and SS set the synagogue on fire. Many Jews were forced to watch the destruction of their place of worship. In addition, 140 Jewish men were arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp for several weeks. After this traumatic experience, even more Jews left Freiburg.
Barely two years later, on October 22, 1940 in the so-called »Wagner-Bürckel-Aktion«, most of the Jews from Baden and the Saar-Palatinate were deported to Gurs in southern France, including almost all of the 350 or so Jewish children, women and men still living in Freiburg. Most of them did not survive the persecution: they either died of the poor living conditions in Gurs or were murdered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in 1942/43.

Freiburg, after 1926, The synagogue with the western portal annex, Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg

Freiburg, 2017, Information panel at the monument in memory of the Old Synagogue, Andreas Schwarzkopf

Victims

Of the more than 1,100 Jews who lived in Freiburg in 1933, at least 314 were murdered in the Holocaust.

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

10 Freiburg Jews who lived in so-called »Mischehen« (miscegenations) survived the persecution in their homeland. After the war, only five native Freiburg Jews returned to the city, where the first Jewish service took place as early as September 1945. In 1948, the Jewish community reached a settlement with the city: the land of the destroyed synagogue remained in the possession of the city, in return for which it took care of the preservation of the Jewish cemetery, which had also been desecrated in 1938. The Jewish community later grew again and in 1985, with the help of the city and the state of Baden-Württemberg, built a new synagogue near the Freiburg Minster.
Already in the 1950s, Jewish citizens in Freiburg tried to erect a monument on the site of the destroyed synagogue. In 1961 a round bronze plaque was finally inaugurated. It bears the inscription: »Here stood the synagogue of the Israelite community of Freiburg / built in 1870 – it was destroyed on November 10, 1938 under a reign of violence and injustice«. Commemorative events were held at the memorial annually in November. The square, which is located in the middle of university buildings, was renamed »Platz der Alten Synagoge« (Square of the Old Synagogue) in 1996.
After 2000 a new discussion about a redesign of the square began. The 2006 competition was won by the architects Volker Rosenstiel and Martin Schedlbauer. Their design envisaged the construction of a water-filled basin on the square with the floor plans of the Old Synagogue, in order to make the destroyed building visible again in the cityscape. The monument was opened in 2017. The old commemorative plaque from 1961 was integrated into the memorial. Remains of the foundations of the destroyed synagogue were found during the construction work. Since December 2020, a bronze model of the former Freiburg synagogue complements the memorial.
The memorial has been controversial since its opening, because especially in warm weather many people get into the water and splash around.

Freiburg, 2017, Square of the Old Synagogue with the new university library, Andreas Schwarzkopf

Freiburg, 2017, Square of the Old Synagogue in the rain, Andreas Schwarzkopf

Open

The square and the memorial are accessible at all times.

Contact

https://www.freiburg.de/pb/1154785.html

kulturamt@stadt.freiburg.de

+49 (0) 761 201 21 01

Platz der Alten Synagoge
79098 Freiburg im Breisgau

Freiburg, 1938, The Old Synagogue in the days after its destruction, Stadtarchiv Freiburg, Inheritance Josef Vollmer

Freiburg, 2020, Bronze model of the Old Synagogue of Freiburg, which was destroyed in 1938, Wikimedia Commons / Markus Wolter / CC BY-SA 4.0

Freiburg, 2017, The bronze plaque from 1961 integrated into the new memorial, Andreas Schwarzkopf

Hanover / Hannover

Ahlem Memorial of the Hanover Region

Since 1987, the Ahlem Memorial on the premises of the former Israelite School of Horticulture at Ahlem commemorates the Jews from the region of Hanover who were deported from the school grounds betwee...

Bremen

Memorial Submarine Bunker »Valentin«

Since May 2011, the Memorial Submarine Bunker »Valentin« commemorates the victims of the satellite concentration camp in Bremen-Farge and six other camps in the region. Between 1938 and 1945, the pris...

Oranienburg

Memorial and Museum Sachsenhausen

The Memorial and Museum Sachsenhausen commemorate the over 130,000 prisoners from all over Europe, held captive in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1936 and 1945. During that time, over 20...