Pieces of Munich synagogue, destroyed on Hitler’s orders, found in river

BERLIN – Eighty-five years ago, Munich’s main synagogue was demolished on direct orders from Adolf Hitler – a terrible harbinger of the destruction to come.

The synagogue was among the first Jewish places of worship to be destroyed in Hitler’s Germany.

Five months later, the Nazis organised countrywide pogroms and laid waste to most of the country’s synagogues, as well as Jewish cultural institutions and businesses.

The Munich main synagogue was lost to history, or so it seemed.

But this week, during a project to refurbish old underwater infrastructure, a construction crew found pieces of the synagogue in a river 8km from where it once stood.

The discovery was a shock, but a joyful one, for Munich’s Jewish community.

The items that the construction workers found, including a large piece of the synagogue’s Torah shrine, were 4.6m to 7.6m below the surface of the Isar river at a site south of Munich.

The building’s remnants were used as landfill material when workers rebuilt an underwater structure after flooding in 1956.

“I knew the imposing building as a child before it was torn down, and I never thought that parts of it could have survived the destruction, much less for them to resurface almost a century later,” said Ms Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria.

Although Munich’s leaders are glad to see pieces of the synagogue reappear, the discovery also shines a spotlight once again on how the Nazis systematically destroyed Jewish life.

The newly found relics illustrate important points, said Mr Bernhard Purin, director of the Jewish Museum in Munich.

“On the one hand, they document the blossoming Jewish life in Munich before 1933,” he said. “On the other, they are a monument to its destruction.”

This week, Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter said the destruction of the Munich synagogue was the “beginning of exclusion, persecution and destruction” of German Jews.

“The fact that today we find remains of the once cityscape-defining magnificent building is a stroke of luck and moves me very deeply,” he said.

Now that officials know what was hidden in the underwater rubble, an estimated 150 tonnes of it will be transferred to a city yard to be carefully scrutinised for more pieces of the synagogue. NYTIMES