85 years ago, the main synagogue in Munich was demolished on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler – a terrible harbinger of impending destruction.
The synagogue was one of the first Jewish places of worship to be destroyed in Hitler’s Germany. Five months later, the Nazis organized nationwide pogroms and vandalized most of the country’s synagogues, as well as Jewish cultural institutions and businesses.
The Munich main synagogue was lost to history, at least that’s how it seemed. But this week, a construction crew on a project to rehabilitate old underwater infrastructure found parts of the synagogue in a river five miles from where it once stood in Munich. The discovery was a shock, but also a joy for Munich’s Jewish community.
The items found, including pillars and much of the synagogue’s Torah ark, were 15 to 25 feet below the surface of the Isar at a site south of Munich. The remains of the building were used as landfill material when workers rebuilt the underwater structure after the 1956 flood.
“I knew the imposing building as a child, before it was demolished, and I never imagined that parts of it would have survived the destruction, let alone that they would reappear almost a century later,” said Charlotte Knobloch, the president of the Jewish Municipality of Munich and Upper Bavaria, in an email.
Although Munich politicians are happy about the reappearance of parts of the synagogue, the discovery also sheds another light on the terrible acts of the Nazis, who not only murdered six million Jews, but also systematically destroyed Jewish life.
The newly found relics illustrate important points, said Bernhard Purin, the director of the Jewish Museum in Munich, explained in an interview. “On the one hand, they document the flourishing Jewish life in Munich before 1933,” he said. “On the other hand, they are a monument to his destruction.”
Completed in 1887, the synagogue was designed to blend in with the Munich architectural style. A newspaper review at the time described it as the “jewel of the city”.
Hitler ordered its destruction in June 1938 after visiting the neighborhood days earlier. Officially it was removed to make room for a parking lot. The company tasked with the demolition stored the rubble in its yard until using it to fortify river infrastructure in the mid-1950s.
Now a stone sculpture between a luxury department store and a BMW museum reminds passers-by where the synagogue stood.
“Today we are as astonished that fragments of the old main synagogue have resurfaced, as shocked by the lack of respect with which they were treated even after 1945,” Ms. Knobloch wrote.
Before 1938 there was a synagogue in almost every major German city. Most of these temples were destroyed in November 1938 during the so-called pogroms Crystal Night. The few survivors were spared because they were too close to non-Jewish buildings for the Nazis to demolish.
Air raids during World War II reduced many German cities to rubble, leaving the remains of many destroyed synagogues gone forever. Fragments from another synagogue in Frankfurt led to ongoing protests against the city building on the site in the 1980s. Eventually, the remains were placed under glass in Frankfurt for visitors to view.
This week, Munich’s Mayor Dieter Reiter said in a statement that the destruction of Munich’s synagogue was the “beginning of the marginalization, persecution and annihilation” of German Jews. “It is a stroke of luck that we are now finding the remains of the magnificent building that once shaped the cityscape and touches me very much,” he continued.
Now that officials know what was hidden in the underwater debris, an estimated 150 tons of it are being taken to a city yard to carefully search for more parts of the synagogue – a job that could take years.
