Dear Friends,
During the past year, the worldwide pandemic unfortunately has also affected the work of the Stolpersteine Initiative Göppingen. Thus, the ceremony of laying Stumbling Stones for the Löwenthal couple in Wäschenbeuren and for the Zeimann couple in Süßen could only take place with a few invited guests. However, thanks to Margit Haas, who covered the ceremony for the local newspaper NWZ, it was possible to make the public aware of it. In addition, there was a detailed, well-designed brochure which was published by members of the Löwenthal family.
In addition to these Stumbling Stones, which had
In previous years, the preparations for the Göppingen Stumbling Stones had been guided and financially supported by Wolfram Hosch, the director of the Göppinger Cultural Department. Mr. Hosch has since retired, and the Stolperstein Initiative looks back at his work with gratitude. This also applies to the cooperation with Dr. Karl-Heinz Rueß, the long-time head of the Department of Archives and Museums in Göppingen. He was always the competent and helpful contact when it came to research about Göppingen. We also would like to wish Dr. Rueß a pleasant retirement, but their retirement does not mean a farewell, because as 'private persons' they still belong to our group.
A new member is Susanne Ganthaler, who offered to regularly maintain the Stumbling Stones in the Göppingen district, which she began immediately. Thank you very much!
Apart from the research into the fate of Kurt Kuhnle, the fates of others were explored and described in 2020: Peter Conrad dealt with the Baer and Metzger families in Süssen, Klaus Maier-Rubner with the life of Falk Sahm, whose Stumbling Stone had been laid in Süßen several years ago. Together with the biographies of the Löwenthals and Zeimanns, five new theme pages have been created on our homepage.
Thanks to our hard-working translators Ingrid Rockwell and Peter Ritz, the texts can be read in English. Sybille Eberhardt, whose book about the Geislingen forced laborers was mentioned in last year's newsletter, has published another important book this year entitled 'What Happened to You, Isaak’. In it, she traces the last years of Isaak Komras, who was born in Vilnius / Lithuania, was abused by the Nazis as a forced laborer, survived, but died shortly after liberation. His grave can be found in the Göppingen cemetery. Harry Legg’s thesis ‘The Holocaust as the Great Leveller?', published in English, also has a close connection with Göppingen because it traces the fate of the Göppingen Eisig family, who had to flee the Nazi dictatorship. They did not belong to the Jewish faith but were considered 'Jewish' by the Nazis because of their ancestors. We also support Mr. Legg in researching his follow-up work.
The outlook for 2021 is clouded by the current pandemic situation. In any case, we will pursue our seemingly everlasting task, which is to maintain and update the homepage.
We wish you an especially healthy year 2021.