Jews and World War II
Jewish families began living in Ludwigsburg during the 19th century and in 1884, a synagogue was built on Solitudestraße, which was later destroyed by storm troopers during the pogrom of November 1938. In 1988, the perimeter of the structure was marked out in plaster on the site. A 1959 memorial and newer memorial plaques commemorate the Jewish Holocaust victims and extol human rights.
In 1940, the Nazi propaganda film, Jud Süß, was filmed in Ludwigsburg. Based on the historical figure, Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, who was executed in Stuttgart in 1738; Oppenheimer lived in Ludwigsburg. During World War II, the city suffered moderate damage compared to other German cities. There were 1500 deaths. It was the home of the prisoner-of-war camp Stalag V-A from October 1939 till April 1945. After the war, there was a large displaced persons camp which housed several thousand mainly Polish displaced persons until about 1948. After 1945 until the middle of 1946, there was also an allied internment camp for war criminals in Ludwigsburg and the U.S. Army maintained a barracks on the edge of town, large enough to have its own American high school. The land was returned to Germany in 1994.
On 27 September 2008, the first 12 Stolpersteine were laid in Ludwigsburg. They are part of a project by artist Gunter Demnig to memorialize individuals who perished under Nazi persecution. Demnig was back in Ludwigsburg on 7 October 2009 to install more Stolpersteine.
Read more about this topic: Ludwigsburg
Famous quotes containing the words jews and, jews, world and/or war:
“The rights of citizenship will be taken away from all Jews and other non-Aryans. They are inferior and therefore enemies of the state. It is the duty of all true Aryans to hate and despise them.”
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“Feminism is an entire world view or gestalt, not just a laundry list of women’s issues.”
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“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to “feel good” about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
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