About 5,000 people marched through the Hessian town of Oberaula to protest the reunion taking place there of veterans of the SS “Totenkopf” (Deaths Head) Division, a unit with a notorious history of slaughtering Jews and others during World War II.
The marchers, who outnumbered the inhabitants of Oberaula by nearly 2-1, chanted “Nazis Out” and laid a wreath at the site of the former synagogue which was destroyed during the 1938 Kristallnacht.
The protestors included members of the Young Socialists, the Green Party, the West German Communist Party and about 100 Jews, many of them Holocaust survivors or children of survivors, some from abroad.
DEMONSTRATION HAD TWO-FOLD PURPOSE
The demonstration had a two-fold purpose: to protest against the Oberaula authorities for renting a municipally-owned hall to the SS alumni and their families, masquarading as the “llman Lake Travel Club” and against the Bonn government for its failure to outlaw HIAG, the umbrella organization of SS veteran groups in West Germany. Under German law, all successor organizations to the Nazi SS and SA are supposed to be banned.
The march took place Saturday as an estimated 200-400 SS veterans were holding their annual reunion under heavy police guard which included about 350 riot police armed with water cannons. The marchers were angry but peaceful and no disturbances or confrontations took place.
A wreath of yellow flowers in the shape of a Star of David was placed at the synagogue site, now part of a private estate. Once, about 100 Jews lived in Oberaula but today there is no marker to testify to their former existence.
Later in the day, the demonstrators held a mass meeting at which strong anti-Nazi speeches were delivered and the government was urged to ban HIAG. That organization was not even listed in the annual official report on far rightwing groups which pose a threat to democracy in the Federal Republic. The ommission, by Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmerman, was publicly approved by Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
The “Totenkopf” veterans themselves protested that their gathering was not political, just a get-together of “old chums” and their families. One of them, Kurt Meier, a member of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), a partner in Kohl’s coalition government, insisted he was not a Nazi, “old or new” but in fact a “liberal.” According to Meier, he and his colleagues learned of Nazi atrocities only after the war.
But documented history tells a different story. The hard core of the “Totenkopf” Division was made up of 6,500 members of the SS “Totenkopfstandarten” who served as guards at various concentration camps. They were trained by the first commander of Dachau, Theodor Eicke, who was also the first commander of the “Totenkopf” Division.
Another member of the division was SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Friedrich Hartjenstein, commander of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp complex in 1944 and later of the Natzweiler concentration camp.
In 1940, the “Totenkopf” Division massacred 100 British prisoners-of-war at Le Paradies in Flandre, France. In 1943, units of the “Totenkopf” participated in the annihilation of the survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, an operation that took the lives of 56,065 men, women and children. The division’s commander at that time, Gen. Paul Hausser, was a founder of HIAG in 1949.
Also in 1943, the “Totenkopf” Division was responsible for the slaughter of 20,000 inhabitants of Charkow, most of them Jews.
SITE OF REUNION WAS KEPT A SECRET
The selection of Oberaula, a town of about 3,500, for this year’s reunion of the division, was kept a secret to avoid counter-demonstrations such as had occurred in past years in other towns where SS alumni gathered. After the hall rental was disclosed, the town authorities were flooded by requests from anti-Nazi groups all over Germany and Europe and from abroad, to cancel the Nazi gathering. These were ignored.
Deputy Mayor Hans Eppo Freiherr Van Doernberg, the local chairman of Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), was especially active in promoting the reunion at Oberaula. He reportedly pressed the town council to rent the hall.
Doernberg’s grandfather, the late Alexander Von Doernberg, served as an SS Oberfuehrer and received the highest SS award, the SS Ehrendegen. He was also a special Ambassador of Hitler and a chief of protocol at Hitler’s office.
The Deputy Mayor is known nationwide as a patron of the church. As such he once used his influence to remove from office a local priest, Volkmar Hundhausen, who would regularly celebrate a mass in honor of Jews who perished in the Kristallnacht and who introduced into the church hand-made sculptures bearing Stars of David.
The Mayor of Oberaula is Hans Joachim Schnuecker, a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that “until now, no one here raised the matter of putting up a commemoration tablet (to Oberaula’s Jews). But we try our best to keep the local Jewish cemetery clean,” he said.
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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.
