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Kaufhof past saved from obscurity
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Cleaning and polishing the Stumbling Stone
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Inauguration of the Klara Oppenheimer Route
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Evening Event for the 34th Stumbling Stone Laying
Kaufhof past saved from obscurity
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Cleaning and polishing the Stumbling Stone
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Inauguration of the Klara Oppenheimer Route
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Evening Event for the 34th Stumbling Stone Laying
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Stolpersteine/Stumbling Stones Würzburg

In 2005 the Wuerzburg city council decided by an overwhelming majority that “Stumbling Stones”(Stolpersteine) for the victims of the Nazi regime should also be laid in Wuerzburg. The participation of the city of Wuerzburg in the action of Gunter Demnig was initiated by city councillor Benita Stolz, who still heads the Wuerzburg Stolpersteine Project.

This decision of the city council cleared the way for the first laying of Stumbling Stones in Wuerzburg in July 2006. Ever since stumbling stones have been laid in front of the last freely chosen place of residence or work of the victims of the National Socialist regime in all parts of the city.

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Layings
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Stumbling Stones Laid

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Maria Jozefa Kapela, was born in Poland, trained as a teacher. In March 1943 she was forcefully abducted and sent to work in various jobs on farms and in restaurants for which she was physically unsuited. She was sent back to the labour office to be redeployed for underperforming. For this she was imprisoned several times and sent to a re-education camp. In the autumn of 1944 her last imprisonment was in the special Gestapo prison. In November 1944 she was taken to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück where she perished in January 1945, only 38 years old.

Maria Jozefa Kapela

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Karl Einstein was born in Bayreuth into a Jewish family which was fully integrated into German society. He enjoyed an education in the classics, studied Law at university in Munich and in 1906 was appointed as a deputy prosecutor at the District Court in Würzburg. Here he enjoyed a successful career and in 1932 was appointed Director of the District Court. This was unusual for a Jew in Germany as the door to higher public office was generally closed to Jews. The National Socialists sacked him from public service. In September 1942 he was deported to Theresienstadt where he died in February 1943.

Karl Einstein

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Image rights John Schwabacher

“August Dambach was a tall, strong young man. However, he was unable to walk properly, only on tiptoe. Whole sentences also caused him problems. He used to walk near or in the cemetery or would sit there on a stone bench, often together with his younger brother.” That’s what his cousin remembers about him. August Dambach was murdered in Pirna-Sonnenstein on 5 October 1940.

August Dambach

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Image rights John Schwabacher

Johanna Stahl took up her studies in German Language and Literature at the University of Würzburg but then changed to Economics which she studied in Frankfurt and completed with a PhD. Back in Würzburg, she worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper and fought for the rights of women, in the Jewish community as well. In 1934 she was forced to give up her work as a journalist, and became involved in helping people in need in the Jewish community, also assisting in matters of emigration. Dr Johanna Stahl herself had the opportunity to emigrate in 1938 but she preferred to stay on in Würzburg to continue to support those who remained.

Johanna Stahl

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Anneliese Winterstein, a Würzburg Sinti woman, was born in 1924. When she was pregnant she was given a prison sentence as a “political prisoner” in 1943 for “breach of her employment contract”. The state did not allow her to marry. Her escape via Alsace was thwarted. In March 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz with her two young sons. The children died. When it became clear that she was to be assigned by the SS to the brothel to work as a prostitute she chose suicide instead.

Anneliese Winterstein

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Image rights StAWÜ 17421

“…. is always wanting something or other, to be transferred to a better department, ….. to have a red dress…..”. That was the last entry on 3 October 1940 in the long clinical records of Margarete Höppel. She had lived in the psychiatric asylum and nursing home in Werneck for 22 years. She was murdered in the extermination centre in Pirna-Sonnenstein on 29 November 1940.

Margarete Höppel

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Image rights John Schwabacher

Dr Leopold Obermayer was born in Würzburg in 1892, the son of a Jewish family. He had a doctorate in Law, and from 1926 had run the wine business founded by his late father. Obermayer lived a confident and dignified life as a homosexual. In 1934 he made the acquaintance of Josef Gerum, the head of the Bayerische Politische Polizei (the Bavarian Political Police) in Würzburg, later the Gestapo. This meeting led to a long, drawn-out ordeal, which ended in Obermayer’s murder in 1943.

Dr. Leopold Obermayer

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Image rights StAWÜ 8873

“Dear All, my dearest Mother, now I am to be executed. Don’t be sad, I have fought for a good and just cause.” These are the first lines of the farewell letter of the resistance fighter Georg Friedrich Hornung which were sewn into the shoulder padding of this clothing. He was accused of high treason and died a violent death in Plötzensee in 1942.

Georg Friedrich Hornung

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Image rights John Schwabacher

Klara Oppenheimer was born in Paris in 1867 and from 1875 grew up in a well-to-do family in Würzburg. After leaving school, she trained as a teacher and then went on to study Medicine in Würzburg. She completed her medical training as a resident physician and in 1918 opened her practice as a paediatrician in her parents’ home, the first woman doctor in Würzburg to open her own practice. Dr Klara Oppenheimer was an emancipated, very dedicated woman who was actively involved in promoting the rights of women and furthering their educational opportunities. In the Nazi period she was constantly hounded by the authorities and in 1942 she was sent to her death in Theresienstadt.

Klara Oppenheimer

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Image rights: Biographische Datenbank Jüdisches Unterfranken

Josef Thalheimer is one of the Jehovah’s Witness victims who were persecuted primarily because they refused to do military service or use the Hitler salute. He was arrested in his home during a bible meeting in 1937. In detention, he was told on several occasions to denounce his religion and be prepared to take up arms and fight for his fatherland. Like all Jehovah’s Witnesses, he was a conscientious objector. He died in Mauthausen concentration camp on 21 March 1940.

Josef Thalheimer

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Image rights StAWÜ 15896

Karl Neubauer was born in 1929 and as a result of his mental and physical handicaps spent almost his whole life in children’s homes. In December 1941 a doctor in the paediatric medical unit in Eglfing-Haar testified: “The child… shows no prospect of being able to work or be educated.” Four months later, on 12 May 1942, he is murdered in the paediatric unit in Kaufbeuren-Irsee.

Neubauer Karl

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Image rights StAWÜ 15896

After the death of his mother, 11-year-old Eugen Staudenraus is sent to a family he did not previously know to help in the household. During the Great Depression he loses his job as a baker and is caught committing minor fraud offences. In the years that follow he has various jobs and is in and out of prison and workhouses until, in 1940, the police send him to a concentration camp as a “professional criminal”. He spends time in six different concentration camps until he takes his own life in 1942.

Eugen Staudenraus

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StABa K 192 Nr. 5591

Adolf Fellmann comes from a Mennonite family of tenant farmers. To begin with he works as a tenant farmer himself, then as a commercial traveller. In 1938 he is arrested by the Gestapo, for allegedly making subversive remarks. All his appeals and pleas for clemency are rejected and, an invalid and 63 years old, he is sent to Mauthausen concentration camp on 9 May 1939. One month later he is dead.

Adolf Fellmann

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StAWü Gestapo Nr.158

Ferdinand Selig was born in 1930 and his brother Friedrich in 1933 at a time when the National Socialists had already taken over in Germany. They were not allowed to play with non-Jewish children, or attend a state school. They had to witness the humiliation of their father Alfred in the Reichspogromnacht. In 1939 they were interned with their parents in Bibrastrasse and then deported. In Riga-Jungfernhof they were separated from their father Alfred, and in March 1942 Ferdinand, now 12, and Friedrich, aged 9 were shot and killed along with their 42-year-old mother Irma in the forest of Bikernieki because they were “unnecessary mouths to feed”.

Ferdinand und Friedrich Selig

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Ferdinand

Friedrich

Image rights John Schwabacher

The Jews were the largest group of victims of the National Socialist terror.In Würzburg hundreds of Stumbling Stones have been laid in their memory. Further Stumbling Stones have been laid for the victims of “euthanasia” murders, for forced labourers and for people who were persecuted because of their ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious or political affiliations.

In addition, stones have been laid for people deemed by the Nazis to be “social misfits” or “professional criminals”. They are now referred to as the marginalised. With a stream of new edicts, laws, and other measures the National Socialist regime increasingly restrictedthe lives of these people, threatened and murdered them.