Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Johannes Grötecke

Bad Wildungen, Hesse

As a 17-year-old high school student, Johannes Grötecke was told to research the history of his town, Bad Wildungen, near Kassel in the state of Hessen. It was 1985 and stories about the Holocaust emerged regularly in the German media, inspiring Johannes to look into the town’s Jewish past. He visited the local museum, explored archives and “tried to get in contact with Jews who had lived in Bad Wildungen and who survived the Holocaust,” he recalls, even interviewing older inhabitants to find out what they knew.

But information was scarce, and it wasn’t what Grötecke read so much as the conversations and correspondence he initiated with the descendants of Bad Wildungen’s Holocaust victims that gripped him—causing him to dedicate the next quarter of a century to preserving the town’s Jewish past and engaging others in his passion. “It was authentic—something you could touch—to talk with people and realize that they had suffered in this period,” Grötecke says about his early findings. “The Bad Wildungen population decided not to talk about the [Holocaust] after the war. They said, ‘We have other problems, we need new jobs, history is not interesting.’ I tried to do my very best to change that.”

And Grötecke did. The town of Bad Wildungen, as the name implies, was known for its natural hot springs that helped rehabilitate people’s health. Jews came here from across Europe and by the early 20th century the city had two Jewish hotels, a Jewish-owned cinema and a synagogue considered one of the country’s finest among towns of this population—only 5,500 people lived in Bad Wildungen in 1933, about 150 of whom, or less than 3%, were Jews.

Half of Bad Wildungen’s Jews emigrated before the war; of those who remained, only three survived. Apart from some newspapers, old address books and stray photographs, few physical traces of the Jewish community in the town had surfaced, says Grötecke, making his discoveries all the more significant to the relatives, visitors, students and others engaging in that Jewish history.

In one instance, Grötecke found a suitcase left behind by Selma Hammerschlag, one of the three Jewish survivors, who returned here in 1945 to discover that all 20 of her relatives—including her husband, Max Hammerschlag, who died near Buchenwald in the final two weeks of the war—had perished. “There were names on the inside, so I began to research the history and found that the suitcase was from Theresienstadt where Selma survived working as a nurse, and I got information about the deportations,” explains Grötecke, who learned through letters that Selma suffered extreme depression, immigrated to New York in 1946 and died there some years later. “This suitcase is an amazing piece, we put it in the local museum and I tell people the story of the Hammerschlag family using this suitcase. Young people are very, very interested in it—it is emotional for them.”

“Johannes is relentless when it comes to ferreting out information,” says Richard Oppenheimer, who sought help from Grötecke when he went looking for information about his mother, a native Jew from Bad Wildungen. “He was actually in contact with my mother 25 years ago, unbeknownst to me, and shared with me a written interview he’d done with her in 1988 before she died—helping me uncover information and facts about her I was unware of.”

Grötecke recalls that his own family never wanted to talk about the war. But late in his grandparents’ lives, Grötecke learned that their house had formerly belonged to a Jewish family—and he caused strife by demanding that they plant Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, to recognize the names and deportation dates of the Katz family who had lived there. “By then I was grown up and I decided, yes, we have to have this discussion,” says Grötecke, who succeeded in embedding five Stolpersteine outside the house while his grandparents were still alive.

They were only a fraction of the 77 Stolpersteine that Grötecke has worked tirelessly to establish across Bad Wildungen in recent years. “I take the students to the Stolper-steine, and some of them now don’t only clean them but research the families’ histories and their fates.” Aside from educating students and locals, for 10 years Grötecke has also assisted the relatives of Holocaust victims by guiding them through the town’s Jewish cemetery as well as showing them the streets and homes where their families lived. “When they come to Bad Wildungen, it is very emotional for them to stand at the Stolpersteine,” he says. “It’s important for them to see that the population of Bad Wildungen remembers the victims and the children of the victims—that they are not forgotten. Their names must be in our town, in our consciousness.”

For the past five years, Grötecke has also spent one specific day per week leading tours of nearby Breitenau, a 12th century monastery that Nazis turned into a concentration camp for Jews during the war. Grötecke has written more than a dozen articles relating to local Jewish history and in 2012 he mounted an exhibition at the local museum, “Former Bad Wildungen Jews and Their Children,” based on more than a dozen family interviews. He produced a 2013 exhibition exploring the history of Bad Wildungen’s synagogue, which was destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938.

Grötecke’s work continues to impact the lives of Bad Wildungen’s Jewish descendants worldwide, from South America and the United States to Israel, the UK and beyond. Freddy Manfred Hirsch, from Capetown, South Africa, commended Grötecke’s “tremendous research” helping him trace back his family roots to 1795. “This is our local history. It’s our duty to care about it,” says Grötecke, with an eye on the future, “and make certain that it can’t happen again.”