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Property protector Thomas Weishaupt: "You are such a small information station"
Photo: Laurenz Schreiner / DER SPIEGEL
If nothing happens, it's a good day for Thomas Weishaupt.
Then he walks slowly twenty meters in one direction.
Turn around again.
Go the other way.
And back again.
The 62-year-old looks at the passers-by and speaks a few words with his colleague.
This is how weishaupt works almost the whole shift.
He is not allowed to look at his cell phone.
“Out of the question,” he says, “at most just checking the clock.” If Weishaupt should ever have to intervene, his attention could mean the difference between life and death for him and others.
Thomas Weishaupt is a property protector.
He protects the New Synagogue in Berlin.
Even if Weishaupt protects an object in terms of job title, it primarily protects the members of the Jewish community.
"It's a shame, of course, that something like this has to be, but it has to be," says Weishaupt.
Because Jewish life in Germany is still threatened 75 years after the end of the Second World War.
This was particularly evident in the attack in Halle on October 9, 2019, when only the stable entrance door of the synagogue prevented an attacker from entering.
The extreme right-wing perpetrator shot two people on the street and in a nearby kebab shop.
The verdict against him is to be announced next Monday.
According to the annual report on politically motivated crime published by the Federal Ministry of the Interior, a total of 2032 anti-Semitic crimes were reported in Germany in 2019.
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