Place of birth: DP camp Feldafing

Created: 05/12/2022, 13:02

By: Sandra Sedlmaier

In the footsteps of their parents: Descendants of the residents of the Displaced Persons Camp in Feldafing visited the former camp site on the Bundeswehr site.

You are standing in front of one of the storm block houses where former concentration camp prisoners and Jewish refugees lived after the war.

© Bundeswehr

Around 700 babies were born in the Feldafing DP camp.

Five of them visited their place of birth yesterday, along with around 20 other descendants of camp residents.

It was a search for clues 77 years after the end of the war and an important chapter for many of them.

Also for Feldafing.

Feldafing -

the place between hell and normality: that was Feldafing for many survivors of the concentration camps after the war.

In the DP camp there, they found their way back to life after the horrors of the Nazi camps.

Yesterday around 25 Jewish citizens from Israel and the USA visited the place where their parents experienced this.

They came on the initiative of Claudia Sack and Prof. Dr.

Marita Krauss to Feldafing.

The two had made contact with a Facebook group of families from the Feldafinger DP camp.

Abe Mazliach (75) from San Francisco founded it four years ago.

Right from the start, Hanna Rosenbaum (74) from Tel Aviv emphasizes the special significance of this visit.

"I show my Israeli passport here at the entrance - my parents were stateless at the time." Her parents probably fathered her in Feldafing, she was born in Tel Aviv.

Five men from the group of visitors were born directly in Feldafing, in the Hotel Kaiserin Elisabeth, where the hospital was located.

Where the five men were born.

Captain Wolfgang Schmid, who has dealt with the history of the DP camp and maintains the memorial room in the small communications technology museum, guides the guests around the site.

Explains that the storm block houses were built in 1934 for the Reich School of the NSDAP.

That students and teachers left the building in mid-April 1945 so that the Americans could accommodate the former concentration camp inmates found on Lake Starnberg there.

That things were chaotic at first, but then improved thanks to the Americans, the international refugee organizations and self-administration.

The guests have many questions, also about the organizational details of the camp.

Above all, they want to see where their parents lived.

Alex Ebel from New York quickly finds what he is looking for: with a big smile he leaves in front of house 41,

In general, this visit is characterized by joy and humor, despite all the sadness about the Nazi atrocities and respect for the bad fate of the parents.

The visitors who have never met harmonize and crack jokes.

Tears flow too.

What the guests value about Feldafing is that it was a place for the parents where they could finally breathe deeply.

"For your parents, the DP camp became a place of transition and hope on the way to a new life," said Feldafing's mayor Bernhard Sontheim at the afternoon reception in the town hall.

The survivors would have possessed incredible strength.

The group had previously visited the Jewish cemetery in Feldafing, a relic from the days of the DP camp.

Alan Aronovitz from New York recites the Psalm 23 of the Good Shepherd and the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

Alex Ebel makes it clear that the visit is more than just a search for clues.

"I've never met anyone who was born in Feldafing." He feels connected to the others in a special way.

"I enjoy the visit here very much." It is a kind of conclusion.

The visit is also important for Sontheim.

That shouldn't be taken for granted, he says and shows visitors the Corbinian apple tree in front of the town hall.

It comes from the seeds that the Nazi-critical pastor Korbinian Aigner grew around 80 years ago in the Dachau concentration camp.

The tree was planted in memory of the death march - which the guests rewarded with applause.