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Kippenheim
10/22/1940
Carrying luggage in his hand, Marx Auerbacher walks towards a municipal police officer standing in front of a personnel carrier. On the left side of the road, you can see children watching and a girl with a bicycle. On the right edge of the picture, the fender of a car is visible, close to which the photographer is standing.
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Historical context
Deportation von Kippenheim nach Gurs am 22.10.1940
On October 22, 1940, the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot), municipal and security police officers deported more than 6,500 people persecuted as Jews from Baden and the region then known as Saar-Palatinate (German: Saarpfalz) to the Gurs internment camp in unoccupied southwestern France. Municipal police officers arrested thirty-one people persecuted as Jews in Kippenheim. They were only allowed to take a maximum of 50 kilos of luggage and 100 Reichsmarks in cash. At noon, the police picked them up directly from their homes and took them in personnel carriers to Offenburg station. There, the persecutees had to board a French passenger train, which then stopped in Freiburg im Breisgau, where more people had to get on. From there, the train took the route via Breisach, Mulhouse and Chalon-sur-Saône to Oloron-Sainte-Marie in the Basses-Pyrénées Department where the deportees probably arrived on October 25 or 26, 1940. From there, they were taken to Gurs by truck.
Starting in August 1942, many prisoners from Gurs were deported to Auschwitz via the Drancy assembly camp near Paris. At least eighteen deportees from Kippenheim did not survive the Shoah.
Sources
About the image series
The picture series from Kippenheim includes five black-and-white photographs in landscape format showing three families being taken from their homes. Thanks to local research efforts, the nine persecutees in the picture are known by name. Uniformed officers of the municipal police and watching neighbors can be seen in all the photographs.
The photographer Wilhelm Fischer obviously took the pictures with the (unspoken) consent of the municipal police. He was able to get close to what was happening at the various places and certainly did not need to hide. The series of pictures was taken by chance, that is to say the images appear on the negatives quite abruptly in between private family pictures.
Photographer
Wilhelm Fischer, carpenter
The carpenter and local writer Wilhelm Fischer from Dölinbach was a well-known amateur photographer in the area around Kippenheim, who used to work for the local press occasionally.
Provenance
For many decades, the five photographs showing the deportation of the Kippenheim Jews were in the private possession of the photographer Wilhelm Fischer. After Wilhelm Fischer’s death, his son-in-law Walter Munz gave the prints of three photographs to the Deutsch-Israelische Arbeitskreis Südlicher Oberrhein (German abbreviation DIA) in 1995. In 2022, they were returned to the Fischer family, i.e. to Wilhelm Fischer's grandson Frank Munz. The five negatives were handed over to the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
Call number at source archive
2024/54/1
Title at source archive
Wilhelm Fischer, Deportation von Juden und Jüdinnen aus Kippenheim, 22.10.1940; Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Depositum
Acknowledgements
Dedicated members of the Deutsch-Israelische Arbeitskreis Südlicher Oberrhein and the Förderverein Ehemalige Synagoge Kippenheim e. V. have secured the photos and spent years researching the fates of the deportees.
We express our particular thanks to Jürgen Stude and Christiane Walesch-Schneller for their support.
Text and research by Lisa Paduch, Christoph Kreutzmüller und Kerstin Hofmann.
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