On 4 May heavy fighting still raged throughout the city, as the Schutzstaffel did not feel bound by the capitulation agreement. When American troops set out from Passau in the direction of Austria, they repeatedly came under fire by SS units. A number of Americans and approximately five hundred SS men were killed in these battles.
For the following day I had planned for them to attend a short memorial service to be held at the cathedral. I felt it was especially important to ask students from local schools to participate in this event. During the time of the American military government in Passau, on 7 May 1946 the Passauer Neue Presse briefly reported in a story—buried within its pages—about a local church service.
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The author grew up there and speaks frankly about the city's embracing Hitler up to very recent times. Anna Elisabeth Rasmus is a German woman who was born and raised in the city of Passau. She was raised in the period after the war and eventually became obsessed with her city’s history of the war. Her desire for truth led to conflict not only in her home city, but in her country as well. There was even a movie about her, one that I will be tracking down.
Incredible story that exposes the racism, hypocrisy antisemitism and denial of the holocaust that continues today. This is the story of a woman who grew up in Passau and wrote an essay about the people's participation in Hitler's 3rd Reich. What she wrote was honest and she was attacked for exposing the truth. What she does that is even worse is expose the current antisemitism, pro Nazi groups that still exist. If I could not prevent the celebration honoring the SS General, I at least wanted to organize a sort of counter celebration. Thus, while the city of Passau was holding its commemoration celebration, I and a number of others stood at the grave of pastor Johann Bergmann, the so-called hero of Nammering, who had saved the lives of some 3,000 concentration camp prisoners.
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This "fame" would, of course, have been severely damaged had anyone pointed out that the factory, which today manufactures cog-wheels, had interned concentration camp prisoners, using them as slave labor to make parts for German tanks. Nevertheless, one day before the American veterans were to arrive, the city of Passau had arranged for a similar event, something they called a commemoration celebration, to take place on 2 May, the day of the occupation of Passau by the Americans. The celebration began at five-thirty in the evening, at the Innstadt cemetery in Passau. Not a single survivor of the various concentration camps and not a single former slave laborer had been invited to participate. Once again, the city held its celebration at the location of the SS graves, where they erected a Hungarian cross, the symbol of the Hungarian SS. In the meantime, a Star of David had been cemented into the ground directly before the gravesite of the SS General Hassenstein. The Jewish community of Lower Bavaria was sent an invitation to formally participate in the celebration, which its president, Israel Offmann, had refused.
I learned a great deal of history about the Nazis and the people of Germany from Ms. Rosmus. There is a long history and one that should have been uncovered. Having visited Eastern Europe last year, I was most enchanted by Passau. During that trip I was brought so close to my father and the fact he had been a German POW for 14 months. I picked this book up to read about Passau and found a deeply moving and enlightening understanding of German Nationalism and anti-Semitism. I gathered a new understanding of American racism and the deep connection to it and the election of our President Elect.
Praise for Out of Passau
Strange that all of these terrible events, though long past and, for many, long since forgotten, are for me still very present. As unimaginable as it is that fifty years later I, a native of Passau, would find myself standing face to face with some of these Americans, the very men who all those years ago had been the ones shouting out Hitler kaputt! To my fellow countrymen; that I would one day be holding in my hands their hand-drawn plans of the lines of troop advancements and sketches of maps copied from old books; that I would be reading their diaries and private letters or making photocopies of their personal photographs from their time in Germany. Ultimately they would give me confiscated documents and appoint me an honorary member of their division. And their experiences would affect my life in such a way that it would never be the same again.
The occasion for the service was the liberation of the concentration camp Mauthausen. On Sunday, 5 May 1946 a High Mass and a Te Deum were celebrated at the cathedral. The priest, the story reported, had delivered an impressive sermon. A delegation of men and women, former prisoners of Mauthausen, were present at the event.
About Anna Rosmus
A few weeks after the Americans’ arrival, locals reported that they had found a mass grave on the Ries, a hill overlooking the city from the north. According to eyewitnesses, Russian POWs had been hunted down like rabbits and shot to death in a nearby section of the forest known as Dead Man. And within a few months another sixty mass graves had been identified.
He had attended college with my uncle and had been a close friend of my family’s ever since. I was certain that he was a person who would be open to my request. I asked him to permit an interfaith service on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war to take place in the cathedral. I wrote, In your role as bishop, it would be certainly within your power to make this possible.
Despite the praise she had earned around the world, officials and citizens of Passau continued to obstruct her work. In this memoir, Rosmus relives her turmoil over whether to stay in Passau or to leave; describes the more open-minded world she found in Washington D.C.; and discusses how she has been able to carry on her research from the United States. Earlier, in 1988, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, or the Night of the Broken Glass (the pogrom of 9–10 November 1938), the city of Passau had stubbornly refused to invite survivors of the Passau concentration camp. Instead, the citizens had decided to commemorate the occasion at the site of the heroes cemetery, or Heldenfriedhof, where, alongside five hundred SS soldiers, the body of General von Hassenstein lay buried. This, I now realize, should not have come as a surprise to me. After all, the few murdered Russians who had initially been buried there were later systematically exhumed and reburied in locations outside the city.
They have refused to attend the conferences of the Jews who return to the camps which they survived. One man makes sordid toasts to the mothers of infants who were murdered and buried on his vacation land. Rather chilling description of the city that Hitler called home. It was the site of several concentration camps and was host to early Hitler rallies.
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