Mayor Theodor Mathieu of this city today ordered the city s church bells to toll for 10 minutes and called upon the entire population to rally for “public atonement” in connection with the two anti-Semitic acts of vandalism which took place at the Jewish cemetery and on a monument dedicated by the city to the local synagogue which had been destroyed by the Nazis in 1938. There are less than 100 Jews now living in Bamberg.
The police placed a security guard at the cemetery where 32 gravestones were desecrated with Nazi inscriptions in letters up to three feet tall. The inscriptions included such phrases as “Long Live the SS,” “Jews Go to Hell,” “Long Live the Fuehrer,” “Six Million Jews Were Too Few.” A picture of Hitler was attached to one of the stones.
The vandalism at the cemetery was discovered by an American Jewish couple who came to visit the graves of their relatives in Bamberg. The public prosecutor launched an investigation. The Bamberg newspaper Frankischer Tag attributed the outrage to a Nazi group. The paper voiced a plea for forgiveness and posted 3,000 marks as reward for discovering and arresting the perpetrators. Other rewards totaling 10,00 marks were offered by others.
Police said today that, contrary to previous reports, no arrests had yet been made in either the cemetery vandalism or in the smearing of the monument to the Bamberg synagogue. The cemetery daubings apparently were done early Tuesday morning, police said. The defacing of the monument was found just before the monument was dedicated last Sunday.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
