In Munich’s Glockenbach district, between second-hand furniture shops and hip boutiques, there stands an inconspicuous building at Reichenbachstrasse 27. Hardly anyone in Munich knows the history of this building. There is no memorial plaque or sign outside. Only inside the building, in the ground floor corridor, is there a small plaque behind a pane of glass:
With the help of God!
This square was the site of the Jewish Community building, which had served as an office building, meeting place, and retirement home since its re-establishment on 25 July 1945. On 13 February 1970, the upper floors of the building were destroyed in an arson attack; the following people perished in the flames:
David Jakubovicz s.A. Max Blum s.A.
Siegfried Offenbacher s.A. Regina Becher s.A.
Leopold Gimpel s.A. Rosa Drucker s.A.
Georg Pfau s.A.
Honour their memory!
These seven people, survivors of the Shoah, were murdered in one of the most serious antisemitic attacks on Jewish life in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. The attack on the retirement home and synagogue at Reichenbachstrasse 27 was never solved, has found no place in the collective memory of the post-Nazi majority society, and has largely been forgotten.Hardly anyone knows the eventful history of this synagogue. Hardly anyone knows how Jewish people ended up in Munich after the war, in the city that had been the centre of the rise of National Socialism in the 1920s; how they resumed their religious life there shortly after the war, and the conditions in which it developed.
The history of the synagogue in Reichenbachstraße is closely linked to the history of the migration of Eastern European Jews to Munich. From the end of the 19th century, there were repeated pogroms against Jews in Tsarist Russia, Hungary, and in large parts of Eastern and Central Eastern Europe, which led many to emigrate westward. Some of them fled to Munich. In 1910, one in four Jews in Munich were originally from Eastern Europe. These people established an independent cultural life in Munich at that time. The influx of Eastern European Jews caused uncertainty among many of the Jews of Munich. They were already subject to enormous pressure to assimilate and faced constant hostility. The cultural and linguistic differences between them and the Eastern European Jews led them to fear that they would lose their own status and become even more exposed to increasing antisemitism. At the time, the Jews of Munich mainly identified with Bavaria, felt connected to the Bavarian royal family, and were proud of their professional and political successes.
At that time, there were already two synagogues in Munich: a liberal one in Herzog-Max-Straße, and an orthodox one in Herzog-Rudolf-Straße. The new arrivals endeavoured to preserve the religious culture of their origins and therefore founded several religiously orthodox prayer rooms. In 1921, the two Eastern Jewish associations Linath-Hazedek and Agudath-Achim purchased the building at Reichenbachstraße 27 from the Schwabinger Brauerei AG. From then on, the building in the rear courtyard was used as a prayer hall. In view of the number of Eastern European Jews living in the Isarvorstadt neighbourhood, these premises soon proved to be inadequate. In 1929, the two associations thus decided to build a synagogue. It was built under the direction of architect Gustav Meyerstein using donations from members of the community and with the involvement of the organised Jewish Community and the General Committee of Eastern Jews. The synagogue was inaugurated in 1931 as the Reichenbachschul. With the newly opened synagogue, there were now three large synagogue buildings in Munich.
The latent antisemitism of Munich civil society became particularly virulent from 1918 onwards. In the following years, attacks on Jews and their belongings and boycotts of their shops became the order of the day. The synagogue of the Jewish Community in Herzog-Max-Straße was demolished in June 1938 on the personal orders of Adolf Hitler. The demolition of the synagogue was intended to test the public’s reaction to state-ordered aggression and acts of arbitrary violence against the Jewish population. The lack of outrage and opposition from the non-Jewish civilian population undoubtedly paved the way for the November pogroms on the night of 9/10 November 1938.
That night, the Reichenbachschul was also attacked, its doors and windows smashed, and Torah scrolls desecrated. As the synagogue was located in a block of flats, the fire brigade was on standby to prevent the flames from spreading to the neighbouring residential buildings. The synagogue was forcibly expropriated and handed over to the Münchner Allgemeine Treuhand AG. The members of the community were expelled, and most of them did not survive the Shoah. After the end of the war, 84 Jews were liberated from labour camps and hiding places in Munich.
AFTER
I have returned – I don’t know how.
A small miracle has happened to me.
I hear the melody of those familiar bells,
that I might see those mountains and forests once more.
I have returned – it pains me so!
Everything different than I once knew,
As I see it with these new eyes,
With which I have read the suffering of the world.
I have returned! Oh, don’t ask me
About those shadows that overcome my senses
And by the moon’s white dead light
At night, roving like ghosts
among the pieces of my shattered soul
Gerty Spies (1897-1997)
Antisemitic pogroms took place in many Eastern European countries after 1945. Several hundred thousand Jews who had survived the Shoah subsequently fled Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia to the western zone of occupation, many of them to Munich and the surrounding area. Most of them did not want to stay in the country of the perpetrators; Munich was merely a stopover for them. But not all of them managed to continue their journey, and so some stayed behind in Munich as ‘displaced persons’. In addition to the few German Jews who had survived the Shoah, the post-war community in Munich consisted largely of Jews who had fled Eastern Europe. In contrast to the liberal tradition of the pre-war period, practised by most Jews in Munich before National Socialism, the focus of religious Jewish life in Munich after 1945 was the Orthodox tradition. The Jewish Community was re-established in July 1945, followed in 1947 by the re-dedication of the synagogue in Reichenbachstraße, which became the city’s main synagogue. In addition to the synagogue, the building complex also housed offices, a kindergarten, a restaurant, and a residence for senior citizens and students.
On Friday, 13 February 1970, at around 8:50 pm, an unknown person entered the Jewish Community building in Reichenbachstraße, poured petrol on the wooden stairs from the fourth floor down to the ground floor, and set them alight. Seven people who had hoped to continue their lives in post-war Germany were killed in the attack.Following the crime, investigations were conducted in various political directions. The police investigation into the perpetrator or perpetrators was quickly discontinued, and the identity of the perpetrators remains unknown to this day. Although the investigation was reopened in 2013, it was closed again in 2017 without any results. According to research by German political scientist Wolfgang Kraushaar from the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, the evidence points to the extreme left-wing terrorist milieu of the time, but this has not yet been clearly proven.
When the event is spoken of now, it is often framed as an attack on a Jewish retirement home. However, anyone familiar with the circumstances knows that the Jewish Community was also based at the premises at the time, leaving no doubt that it was one of the most horrific acts of antisemitic violence in post-war Germany. It must be seen in the context of a wave of antisemitic terror that was occurring at the time. Just a few days earlier, on 10 February, an El Al plane was attacked at Munich airport. One passenger was killed, and nine other people were seriously injured. A few days later, on 21 February 1970, a Swiss Air plane bound for Tel Aviv crashed after a bomb exploded on board. All 47 passengers died. The traces of the bomb, which was disguised as a piece of mail, could also be traced back to Munich. Within eleven days, this wave of terror claimed 55 lives. Hardly anyone now remembers those two attacks, either.
The victims of the attack had no relatives. For a long time, the crime was completely erased from the city’s memory. In 2020, 50 years after the crime, a memorial container with photos of the night of the fire and the names of the victims was installed at Gärtnerplatz, very close to Reichenbachstraße, at the initiative of cabaret artist Christian Springer. The hope was that confidants of the perpetrators would break their silence, with new evidence perhaps leading to a belated break in the case. Although the installation was able to call the most serious attack on Jewish life in post-war Germany into people’s memory for a short time, most people in the city of Munich and throughout Germany know nothing about that night on which seven people died.
In memory of .
.. … the first victim of the arson attack, Max Meier Blum, 71, a retired furrier who had returned to Munich from New York only a year earlier.
… milliner Rivka Regina Becher, 59.
… Leopold Arie Leib Gimpel, office worker, 51.
… chef and innkeeper David Jakubowicz, 60, who had already packed his bags to emigrate to his sister in Israel.
… librarian and municipal archivist Siegfried Offenbacher, who had only turned 71 a few days before the attack. He had been deported to the Dachau concentration camp in 1934.
… and the married couple Georg Eljakim Pfau, an upholsterer, 64, and Rosa Drucker, 60.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Olympic bombing. But even before that, Jews were murdered in Munich: on 13 February 1970.
