DISTRICT OF HILDBURGHAUSEN
Themar’s Jewish families and the end of the war in 1945
Friday, June 20, 2025
By Cornell Hoppe
The fates of Themar’s Jews during the Nazi era are diverse. Many fall victim to the Nazis, some survive – many far away.
Themar. When World War II ended in Europe in May 1945, countless European Jews lost their lives in the Holocaust. 205 members of Jewish families from Themar, however, survived. Most of them because they managed to flee the country in time. This scattered Themar’s Jews throughout the world. At the regular gatherings held in Themar, where Stolpersteine (stumbling blocks) were laid in honor of the families in front of their voluntarily chosen homes, people repeatedly met who had traveled to Themar from all corners of the world to trace their ancestors. Some lived in Germany or neighboring European countries. Others had already traveled to Themar from Australia, South Africa, Uruguay, Canada, and the USA.
Canadian professor Sharon Meen has been researching Themar’s Jewish families for several years and has been collecting – among other things on a special website – the stories of these families, giving faces to their names and their history. For a long time, it was assumed that only two Jews from Themar survived the war – Otto Baer, who survived Auschwitz, and Meta Krakauer (née Frankenberg), who survived the Theresienstadt ghetto. As Sharon Meen has discovered, several more survived. The twins Johanna and Gunter Haaß, for example, were born in Themar in 1928 and were the children of Erna Kahn and Hermann Haaß, a Jew and a non-Jew. They survived in the care of their father’s relatives. They were 17 years old after the war. Both remained in Themar and the surrounding area. Hanna remained single and worked in Themar for the Morgenroth family; she died in 1968. Gunter became a police officer. He married and lived with his wife and two children in a small village near Themar. Gunter died in 1988, shortly before the Wall fell.
Scattered all over the world
Eleven-year-old Ellen Neumann, daughter of Adolf Kahn, lived with her mother and stepfather in Themar. She continued to run her stepfather’s photography business until the 2000s. She died in Themar in 2019. Members of other Jewish families from Themar also lived elsewhere in Germany; they were married to non-Jewish spouses, for example, or were children of interfaith marriages. Else Rosenberg (née Pabst), the wife of Julius Rosenberg (born 1910 in Themar), lived in Darmstadt with their 11-year-old daughter Lotte. After the war, Else contacted the administration in Hildburghausen to find out what had happened to Julius. In the early 1950s, Else and Lotte, as well as Lotte’s husband, Peter Schaefer, left Germany to live in Canada. Else died in Vancouver in 1965. In 2017, Lotte returned for the first time with her daughter Bianca, her sister Lore, and other relatives to visit her family’s cradle in Themar and participate in a Stolperstein laying ceremony in honor of her ancestors.
Train to Freedom
Nine members of the Jewish families of Themar survived the Theresienstadt ghetto. One of them, Hulda Grünbaum (née Schlesinger), had left Theresienstadt on the so-called “Train to Freedom” for St. Gallen, Switzerland. The Train to Freedom was part of an agreement that Heinrich Himmler had made shortly before the end of the war with Swiss President Jean-Marie Musy and a Jewish organization. In exchange for money and goods, Jews from the Theresienstadt ghetto were brought to Switzerland. Hulda was later reunited with her daughter Ilse in England, where Ilse had lived since 1939. In 1948, the two women sailed to Australia, where Kurt Grünbaum, son and brother, lived. Both Ilse and Kurt married and had children. Hulda’s grandson, Garry Meller, has thoroughly researched his family history and has contributed significantly to the history of Themar, Walldorf, and Schmalkalden, the ancestral homes of the Grünbaum and Schlesinger families. In 2019, he came to Themar to honor the Grünbaum family at the laying of Stolpersteine.
On May 8, 1945, seven women and one man from Themar’s Jewish families were liberated in the Theresienstadt ghetto: Doris Lorenzen (née Frankenberg), Meta Krakauer (née Frankenberg), Hulda Grossmann (née Bär), Gertrud Heim (née Walther), Rita Dressel (née Walther), Walter Dressel, Margot Dressel, and Minna Frankenberg (née Gassenheimer).
Return as Soldiers
Some members of the Jewish families from Themar had also returned to Germany in another way. And that was even before the end of the war: as soldiers. At the beginning of April 1945, American soldiers under the command of George Patton were in the Hildburghausen district. On April 7, a unit reached Themar. Among the American soldiers was Ludwig Mühlfelder, then 21 years old. Ludwig was the son of Julius Mühlfelder (born 1891 in Themar), a member of the large
Frankenberg family, one of the founding families of the Jewish community in Themar. In November 1939, Ludwig left Germany for America with his parents and his sister from Suhl, where this branch of the family lived. In his memoirs, Ludwig Mühlfelder later wrote: “But one cannot blame the younger German generation for this terrible chapter that their parents and grandparents inflicted. What I expect and demand from the descendants of the perpetrators is a complete reckoning with the crimes of their people.” Mühlfelder first revisited his Thuringian hometown of Suhl in 1996. He had long hesitated to set foot on German soil again. He died in 2004 in Livingston, New Jersey.
Norbert Müller, great-great-grandson of Salamon and Karoline Müller, one of the founding families of the Themar Jewish community, also returned to Germany as a soldier. Norbert was born in Tann in the Rhön region. His family moved to Nuremberg and, after the pogroms of 1938, to the Netherlands. Norbert Müller, then 15 years old, was sent to England in 1939 as part of the Kindertransport program. At the age of 20, he enlisted in the British Army and returned to Germany as a soldier.
High-ranking Nazi arrested
Among other things, he is involved in arresting a high-ranking Nazi. Norman Miller, as he now calls himself, is working at a checkpoint on the American-British sector border in Hamburg on May 7, 1945, when a car stops. One of the four men in the vehicle says he has papers that Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery must sign. Although a German police officer said the papers looked “in order,” Norman was asked for help. He recognizes the man’s name and face from the newspaper. It is Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who, as Reich Commissioner in the occupied Netherlands, was responsible for the deportation of thousands of Dutch Jews to concentration camps. He had previously held a similar position in Poland. Seyss-Inquart is later found guilty and executed at the Nuremberg trials of the major war criminals. Norman Miller went to the USA after the war. He first told his sons about his experience at the Hamburg checkpoint during a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1999. Norman Miller died in 2024, shortly before his 100th birthday.
Translated by Google Translate.
