The Reinsburgstraße

- Stuttgarter Zeitung of 15.02.1948 -

Suppose your mentally disturbed stepfather (whom you had long considered a genius) had murdered all members of a neighboring family except for one and set fire to their home. Would you not consider yourself obligated to be especially nice to those who remained, even if you did not like you?

If you answer this question in the affirmative, let me tell you that the majority of 1500 Polish Jews on the upper Reinsburgstrasse in Stuttgart are the survivors of Radom's Jewish population, who in August were 1942 of the German SS has been "liquidated".

Of the more than three million Polish Jews whose extermination Hitler had assigned to the SS, about 150 000 remained, one under twenty. Of the 450 000 in Warsaw around 10 000, one of forty-five. In Radom, a town of 90 000 residents, 30 000 Jews were "exiled" at that time. They were rounded up like cattle, men, women and children, then two piles were made. The one, big one, were those who were about to be killed because they seemed unfit for hard work, especially the old and the children, and then all the "specimens" that did not look very strong. They were crammed into cars and taken about 200 miles away to the extermination camp in Treblinka (between Warsaw and Bialystok). There it went off the train to the gas chambers, after clothes, underwear and shoes were neatly delivered. The small bunch, in total only about 3 000 persons, was destined to "annihilation through work". They were first locked in a local camp, then distributed to Majdanek, Auschwitz and other concentration camps, and came in the summer 1944, retreating from Poland, mostly to Vaihingen an der Enz. When the collapse in April 1945 about half of these people were still on Life, the most resilient, not always the best. For them, after various intermediate stations, in August 1945 the camp in the Reinsburgstrasse has been established. Similar camps are still in Backnang, Hall, Heidenheim, Ulm and Wasseralfingen, in the whole live in them around 18 000 persons. They are all waiting to emigrate to Palestine, where, according to the United Nations' decision, a Jewish state is formed.

Here, I would like to be able to continue writing as follows: After the opening of the camp in Reinsburgstrasse, the state parliament and the government in Württemberg-Baden declared that it was their duty to make amends to the survivors of the most gruesome crime in modern history dead relatives had been sinned by the previous German government. All Jewish DP with the concentration camp tattoo on the forearm are treated as guests of the Wiirttemberg-Baden government, until they can leave our country. They are entitled to double food rations, decent clothes and comfortable housing, all at government expense. You get free travel on public transport, for their representatives are reserved places of honor at all public events. When they leave for their new home, they receive travel money in good currency and also a sum that allows them to start a new life at the destination.

This or something similar should mean, if it is mine - not hers? The concept of law and justice, which demands that injustice be made right again, no matter whether the person in question likes it or not. B. Negro trader or not. Of course, clever people will prove to me that I have gone into Utopian regions and that in politics it is not always possible to do what one would in church - at least preach. But I can not help it: then I can not blame the Jews in Reinsburgstrasse for their illicit trafficking. He is, as things are, an act of self-assertion, of self-defense, one might almost say, in a world as it must appear to the survivors of Radom: where everyone does best to care for themselves, where, under circumstances all stand against one, in short: where violence goes right.

Others will say to me that so far the German Jews, who have lost everything, have not been compensated, that the political persecutees, the bomb victims, the refugees are shown the cold shoulder, who are "closer" to us than the inhabitants from Radom. And yet I find that the National Socialist State has done the worst damage to this man, and that they should have been the first to whom reparation, if only a sincere gesture of reparation, should have been made, except that it was one It is a peculiar excuse to say that you do things for others who are entitled to compensation, and nothing.

Hand on heart: would you hesitate to procure the means for your later settlement in Palestine by means of trafficking in Germany, after a German government murdered your parents and siblings, deprived you of your property yourself and then carried you through a few years had dragged the concentration camp, with the intention not to let you live? Would you reject it, in this case yours IDECatering to supplement about 2000 calories by means of the black market? Maybe even with the help of this trafficking to help finance the camp school, in which Jewish children are taught in arithmetic and religion, geography and gymnastics; the trade school where the 17- to 24-year-olds are trained as locksmiths and blacksmiths, as tailors or dental technicians, so that they can one day put their husband in the land of hope?

Stuttgarter Zeitung, 4. Jg., No. 16 from the 15. February 1948

Reinhard Appel recalls that the article "hit like a bomb". The result was a flood of letters from readers to Schairer. "He, who has always taken care of the little man, this time held the mirror in front of his face ... The indignation erupted in over a hundred letters and the soul of the petty bourgeois emerged in a revealing way."