The story of anti-Semitism in Eisleben finds the French Chloe Devis, 34 years, directly on the market square. There stands a well four-meter-long and 1.5-ton bronze sculpture of the most famous Jew-hate of his time: Martin Luther. Devis came to Paris from Paris to see how her family lived here in Eisleben until the Second World War. She wants to document the visit with a friend. Devis is Jewish.
Next to the little woman with brown curls is Rüdiger Seidel, 67, a retired history teacher and chairman of the "Förderverein Eislebener Synagoge". "Look, over there was the textile business of Siegfried Rosenthal," says Seidel. Also, Jews had a shop next to them - and also where the optician is today. Seidel's finger goes along the rows of houses.
Right next to the market square is the "Jüdenhof", where Jews lived in the Middle Ages. When asked what happened to all the shops and homes, Seidel answers directly: "Aryanization". Since 1938 there is no more Jewish life in Eisleben. The National Socialists murdered and drove away people.
Eisleben, that is a 23,000-inhabitant city in southern Saxony-Anhalt. A small pretty place with many streets and cobblestones. It is the birthplace of the reformer Martin Luther, who is honored here almost every corner. And it is the birthplace of Stephan Balliet. The 27-year-old who went to school lived in a nearby village - and on October 9, drove an hour to Halle to a synagogue to kill Jews. Two people died in the attack. Probably the worst anti-Semitic crime of this century on German soil could only be prevented by the stable wooden door of the synagogue.
The great-great-grandparents managed to flee
Balliet was anti-Semite. In the live video of his act, he says, "I think the Holocaust never happened." His mother also reveals in an interview with SPIEGEL TV that she believes in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Whether Balliet knew a Jew, if he ever met a Jew, is not certain. Where the culprit comes from, no Jews live today. Anti-Semitism has existed for millennia around the world. Balliet, however, came from Eisleben in Germany, a place where hatred of Jews has a special history.
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Already last year Devis was invited by the city with her mother Rosalyn Mayer to inaugurate a so-called "stumbling block". One commemorates her ancestor Siegmund, who was murdered by the National Socialists in the concentration camp. Their ancestors are from the family "Isenberg". Devi's great-great-grandparents fled from Eisleben shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Teacher Seidel climbs up the stairs with Devis in a small house, the walls are porous, it creaks across the wooden floorboards. From 1814 to 1938, the building was used as a synagogue - now threatening disintegration. In 2002, Seidel's club bought the synagogue, uses it as an exhibition space, received funding and is now trying to preserve it.
Current exhibition: "Luther's image of the Jews and his long shadow in central Germany". Everywhere in the region, from Wittenberg to Halle, the former Augustinian monk and founder of Protestantism is honored to this day. The assassin Balliet was born in the Lutherstadt Eisleben, went to the Martin Luther High School and Martin Luther University in Halle. As the exhibition conveys in the Eisleben Synagogue, anti-Semitism with Luther has one of its most important historical origins.
"What do we Christians want to do now with this depraved, damnable people of the Jews?" Wrote Luther. In his book "Of the Jews and their Lies" he called for "burning synagogues". In his last sermon in Eisleben, 1546, he calls for the complete expulsion of Jews from the city. "Luther made the first steps from Christian Catholic anti-Judaism to racist anti-Semitism," says Seidel. Luther wrote of the Jewish "sweat of the nose". He did not want to accept that the Jews would not be converted, and declared them an enemy.
The Nazis also appealed to Luther. In 1933, the Eislebener Tageblatt titled the reformer's 450th birthday: "Luther, the German prophet." During the Reichskristallnacht on November 9, 1938, the Nazis ransacked and smashed the synagogue in Eisleben's Lutherstraße - only a few houses away from Luther's birthplace. Balliet is said to have used projectiles, which he painted with small swastikas.
The active neo-Nazi scene in the region
Seidel deals with the history of his city, he says. He has always lived in Eisleben and was a teacher at that Luther school, where even the assassin once poked the darkest chapter of German history. He did not teach him, Seidel says, becoming a bit emotional. It is important to him to educate his students about the story. They helped him in projects to track down Jewish history in the region.
Again and again the synagogue was attacked by neo-Nazis. In 2015, strangers beat a pig's ear at the door. The police did not find the culprits. There is an active neo-Nazi scene in the region.
In the late afternoon, Seidel drives Devis to the edge of the old town on a hill. It is the Jewish cemetery of Eisleben, which is completely fenced. In front of it there is a puddle on the asphalt, around it lie small, white crayons, shriveled chalk dust.
The night before someone wrote something there: "Jews out", it looks like a childish script - you can also see an SS symbol and a swastika. Seidel has a picture of it on the phone that an acquaintance made a few hours earlier. Now there is nothing to watch, someone has eliminated the desecration.
Devis photographs the remains of the chalk. But then she takes the camera down and looks at the graves. "I'm scared," she says.
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