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Just some random photos from Munich at 6am today…. I was still tired from the overnight coach journey, so they might be a little bit wonky.

Karl Vossler (6 September 1872 – 18 May 1949) was a German Romanist and linguist who became one of the leading European scholars of Romance literature before 1933, then a conspicuous academic opponent of Nazism in Munich. It’s for that opposition to the Nazis that has led this museum to feature him and his bravery in opposing the regime. He was born in Hohenheim near Stuttgart and Vossler studied German and Romance philology in Tübingen, Geneva, Strasbourg, Rome and Heidelberg, taking his doctorate in 1897 and his habilitation in 1900. He held the chair at Würzburg from 1909 and moved to the University of Munich in 1911, where he taught for the rest of his life. His standing brought election to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and, in 1926, the Pour le Mérite for the arts and sciences.

Politically he was no revolutionary in 1914, signing the wartime ‘Manifesto of the Ninety-Three’ (an interesting document in its own right), yet by the 1920s he was speaking publicly against rising antisemitism and the völkisch right. In a 15 December 1922 lecture to students he likened the swastika to barbed wire and during his 1926–27 term as rector he insisted on including Jewish student fraternities in university ceremonies while ordering the republican black-red-gold flag to be flown on campus. After Hitler’s takeover Vossler tried to shield colleagues, notably defending the philosopher Richard Hönigswald’s position in 1933. The regime soon branded him “politically unreliable” and on 1 October 1937 he was forced into early retirement and barred from teaching, a measure the Nazi lecturers’ association justified by casting him as an ideological opponent.

When the war ended he returned to public academic life, serving as rector of the University of Munich from March to August 1946 to rebuild the institution and he delivered the memorial address that November for the university’s victims of National Socialism, including the White Rose. Vossler died in Munich on 18 May 1949 and was given an honorary grave in the city’s Waldfriedhof. At least he got to see the Nazi regime that he so hated coming to an end and he is now one of the city’s heroes.

This is another exhibit at the museum which is from their special exhibition “Memory Is” which is running until May 2026. I’ve visited a lot of museums which have exhibits about the Second World War and the advance of the Nazis, but I can’t recall ever seeing an item which was in a shop during Kristallnacht on 9 and 10 November 1938. This hat was located at the Heinrich Rothschild Hat and Accessories Stall in Sendlinger Strasse (the site is now the Tretter shoe store) and it was badly damaged during the pogrom and then forcibly liquidated soon after.

The above photo was taken after the pogrom and shows the shop boarded up following the attacks. The Munich City Museum’s director, Konrad Schießl, purchased 92 of the shop’s hats at a heavily discounted price, something which I think showed some considerable foresight. It wasn’t clear that anyone knew what to do with the though and they languished in the museum’s stores and their provenance was left unquestioned. In 2016, the museum wanted to put them on display and they made efforts to find the descendants of the owners and the family allowed the museum to keep the items so that they can remain as exhibits.

Katrina Recker, the great-granddaughter of the former shop owner Heinrich Rothschild, noted:

“In the name of my family, I am deeply grateful that this hat, a very personal and moving contemporary witness, now stands as an eternal reminder of the fate of millions of Jewish families during that time. Never forget and never again.”

And it’s an intriguing thought that this hat was inside the shop when the pogrom took place, it’s another very powerful exhibit that the museum has chosen to put on display.

I wasn’t surprised to read in the museum about how Jews were banned from libraries in Munich in the 1930s as their rights were so comprehensively stripped away from them, but I’m not sure that I’ve actually seen a sign being so clear that they were banned from accessing education in this way. The particular location referenced here was the Deutsches Museum library which is the largest of its type in the country and by 1932, it was known internationally for how it led the way in promoting reading, learning and understanding.

The library doesn’t directly mention on its website about this ban on Jews being able to access the books, but they do note:

“During the Nazi regime, the Deutsches Museum could only maintain its independence by making numerous concessions: Nazi functionaries were elected to the museum’s committees, a “Hall for Motor Vehicles” sponsored by Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler opened in 1938, but above all the library building was used for several propaganda exhibitions, including the inflammatory show “The Eternal Jew”.”

There are some regimes around the world which still attack libraries, hoping that denying education to those they seek to oppress will someone strengthen their own case and position. For anyone who loved books, learning and education it must have been traumatic to see that denied to them.

This painting is one of the items in the “Memory Is” collection which is on display at the museum until May 2026. The painting, by Karoline Wittmann, shows her sister Maria and her sister’s son, Georg. Georg had been born in 1928 and opposed the regime and was sympathetic to the suffering that he saw the Jews were enduring, secretly wearing a Star of David on his undershirt. The museum describes him as a “rebellious spirit” and it’s evident that he wasn’t what the Germans considered to be a well-behaved young man. However, Georg’s father had been killed in Ukraine in 1943 and his mother was required to do wartime labour.

In February 1945, he and a friend entered a bombed out villa in Bogenhausen and got drunk on bottles that they found in the wine cellar. The police arrested them but as there was no space in Munich’s prisons by that time, he was sent to Dachau concentration camp and thrown into Barrack 27. His bereft mother took him food parcels in the attempt to help and protect him, but it’s not thought that they ever got through to him. She and Karoline went to Dachau on 10 April 1945 and the authorities admitted that Georg had died on 3 April 1945 and they claimed he had died of blood poisoning and that he had been cremated, giving his mother some of his ashes. The camp was overrun by typhus and famine at the time, it was likely that this combination is what made Georg unwell.

The friend arrested with Georg survived the war and he later explained that he was actually thrown alive onto a pile of corpses and left to die. There were no crematoria in operation at the time, he was buried in a mass grave and the ashes given to his mother weren’t his. Georg was her only child and his mother suffered terribly until her death in 1984, never allowing any mention of her son. Georg was nicknamed Schorschi by his friends and his death at the age of 16 was just another unnecessary casualty of war, being killed shortly before Dachau was liberated by the Americans on 27 April 1945. What looked liked just a typical painting from the period transpired to have a story behind it which the museum has done well to uncover and to explain to visitors.

Franz Stenzer (9 June 1900 – 22 August 1933) was someone that I hadn’t heard of before visiting this museum and he was featured in a section of individuals who opposed the Nazi regime. He was born in Planegg near Munich, he moved to the city as a teenager, served briefly in the navy at the end of the First World War, then found steady work at the Bahnbetriebswerk in Pasing. Colleagues repeatedly elected him to the works council, and in 1919 he joined the local KPD group, cutting his political teeth in workplace and union battles during the turbulent early Weimar years.

By the mid-1920s Stenzer had risen into the leadership of the KPD’s South Bavarian district. From autumn 1928 to spring 1929 he attended the International Lenin School in Moscow, returned to Munich as a full-time organiser, and was elected to the Pasing city council in 1929. He later edited the party paper Neue Zeitung in Munich and, at the November 1932 election, won a Reichstag seat for the KPD and in 1932 he also joined the party’s Central Committee.

After Hitler came to power Stenzer stayed in Bavaria, working underground to coordinate the KPD’s illegal network and this displeased the new regime. The police could not find him at first and on 19 April 1933 they took his wife Emma (who lived until 1998) hostage, leaving their three young daughters at home. He was seized in Munich on 30 May 1933, taken the next day to the newly established Dachau concentration camp, and singled out as a prominent opponent of the regime. On 22 August 1933 SS men removed him from his cell and murdered him with Nazi newspapers claiming he was shot while trying to escape, a story later disproved by an investigation that established he had been killed with a close-range shot to the back of the head.

Emma Stenzer was released for the funeral, then fled with the children via the Saar and Paris into Soviet exile before returning to Germany after the war. Franz is commemorated among the murdered members of the Reichstag in Berlin, and in Munich in 2023 a memorial sign was installed at his former home on the 90th anniversary of his killing in 2023. In the GDR his name was also given to the substantial ‘RAW Franz Stenzer’ railway works in Berlin-Friedrichshain. The news of his death wasn’t secret and was reported in the British media of the time and it must have been something which caused some concern to a few readers who could foresee what was going to happen. He is significant for many reasons, but not least as the first member of the Reichstag to be murdered by the Nazis.