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Bretten
10/22/1940
Jakob and Berta Veis in front of Melanchthon House: He has luggage and a white cane in his right hand, she is on his left with a coat over her arm. Two teenagers watch them from close by. Behind the couple walk two uninvolved women, one of them pushing a loaded bicycle.
Image: Stadtarchiv Bretten
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Historical context
Deportation von Bretten nach Gurs am 22.10.1940
On October 22, 1940, the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot), the municipal and security police deported more than 6,500 Jews from Baden and the region then known as Saar-Palatinate (German: Saarpfalz) to the Gurs internment camp in unoccupied southwestern France. Eighteen people from Bretten persecuted as Jews were arrested early in the morning by the municipal police and had to present themselves at the town hall in Bretten by 12:00 a.m. at the latest with a maximum of 50 kg of luggage and 100 Reichsmark in cash. At 3:30 p.m., police officers took the persecutees by truck from Bretten's market square to Karlsruhe train station. From there, they travelled on a French passenger train which passed through Mulhouse and Chalon-sur-Saône and took them to Oloron-Sainte-Marie in the Basses-Pyrénées department of France, where they probably arrived on October 25 or 26, 1940. They were taken to Gurs by truck.
Starting in August 1942, the prisoners were deported to Auschwitz via the Drancy assembly camp near Paris. Only five persecutees from Bretten were to survive the Shoah.
About the image series
The picture series from Bretten consists of four black-and-white photographs in portrait format. They are available as digital copies and show nine people persecuted as Jews on their way to the assembly point in Bretten town hall. All the persecuted persons in the picture are known by name. One picture shows three of them getting into the loading area of a truck waiting on the market square. Bystanders are only visible in one picture, and only one picture shows uniformed officers of the municipal police.
Otto Leiser, the town's Lutheran pastor at the time, secretly took photographs without the knowledge of those involved in the deportation.
Photographer
Otto Leiser, pastor
Otto Leiser was born in Karlsruhe on May 17, 1900, and, in 1918, he served as a soldier in the First World War. He was an active member of the Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church) and, from 1936 on, Lutheran town pastor of the East Parish in Bretten and district leader of the Bekennende Kirche.
After the outbreak of the Second World War, Leiser was drafted as a private. Just a few months later, in the spring of 1940, he was furloughed on the condition that he remain on standby duty and returned to his parish in Bretten.
In 1952, he moved to Mannheim Käfertal, where he was pastor of the Union Church until his retirement in 1965. Otto Leiser died in 1979.
Provenance
The pictures of the deportation from Bretten to Gurs have been in the possession of Stadtarchiv Bretten (Bretten town archives) since 2006. The archivist at the time, Edmund Jeck, probably received them from a son of the photographer Otto Leiser, the town’s Lutheran pastor at the time. The pictures are only available as digital scans, as the original prints can no longer be found.
Call number at source archive
Ohne Signatur
Title at source archive
StaB Deportation Bretten-Gurs_D
Acknowledgements
A big thank you goes to Alexander Kipphan from Stadtarchiv Bretten for providing the pictures and helping with their description. Many thanks also to Christiane Walesch-Schneller and Valeska Wilczek from the Blaue Haus Breisach, who have painstakingly reconstructed the routes and departure times of the deportation trains.
Text and research by Kerstin Hofmann.
Kooperationsverbund #LastSeen. Bilder der NS-Deportationen Dr. Alina Bothe Projektleiterin
c/o Selma Stern Zentrum für Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg
Freie Universität Berlin
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14195 Berlin
lastseen@zedat.fu-berlin.de
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