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On 18 July 1994 I extended an offer to Dr. Brunner, of the Passau cultural council, as well as to the members of the Passau city council, to read the enthusiastic letters I had received from the Americans. That way they could see for themselves how sincere the American veterans were, and how much they were looking forward to a return to Passau. In the meantime, approximately one hundred of the veterans had indicated that they would be coming. I continued to petition for just enough money to cover an overnight stay in a hotel and to fund a reception at city hall to be made available for this group to make a one-day visit to Passau. There also was to be an organ concert at the cathedral and a short cruise on the Danube. Additionally I suggested inviting the citizens of Passau to the reception in order to facilitate and encourage contact between the two groups.
I do wish that a chapter had been added or the epilogue expanded to address highlights of her life and work in the 10 years since this book was initially published in 2004. The woman who started it, who stars in it, got the idea when she was working as a re-enactor at a historical site (I believe Mt. Vernon) and got asked stupid questions. She even had people try to argue in front of students that slavery wasn’t really that bad of a thing. I wish I would have read this book prior to going to Passau.
Quotes from Out of Passau: Le...
No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Once you finish Out of Passau, you may well believe the answer to the question of Asmus's unstinting everyday courage is simply fate. This first section is very much like The Witness House, and like that book, could only be written by a German.
She never dreamed her youthful research would be the start of a distinguished publishing career and that her life would be the basis for the 1990 Academy Award-nominated film "The Nasty Girl". Since Rosmus had no knowledge of these and other Nazi affiliations and activities in her hometown, she embarked on her essay project confident that the Passau citizenry would be proud of her findings. She never dreamed her youthful research would be the start of a distinguished publishing career and that her life would be the basis for the 1990 Academy Award-nominated film The Nasty Girl. Passau, Germany, her entire life, yet she was unaware that the father of Heinrich Himmler had once been a professor at the college-preparatory high school she attended or that Adolf Hitler and other prominent Nazi party members had grown up just across the Danube River in Austria. About her fateful decision to expose her hometown's Nazi past. In this volume Rosmus recounts her determination after years of persecution, threats and physical attacks to immigrate to the United States.
Anna Rosmus
According to eyewitnesses, Russian POWs had been hunted down "like rabbits" and shot to death in a nearby section of the forest known as "Dead Man." Most of the bodies were never exhumed. I was born in 1937 just before the events described in this book. However, I have been a student of history especially 20th century history all of my life.
While this section can be moving, in particular when she discusses her daughters, it feels a little looser than the first half. The theme, if you will, is the multiculturalism that she finds outside of Germany, perhaps allowing her to form more questions. IMOGEN VON TANNENBERG is director of translations at the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation established by Steven Spielberg. You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser. "Myrtle Wreath Award," by Hadassah, "in recognition of selfless and fearless pursuit of the truth about the Holocaust," March 30, 1995, Washington D.C.
More Books by Anna Elisabeth Rosmus
For 32 years Rosmus has dedicated her life to uncovering anti-Semitism and the Nazi past of her hometown in Bavaria, and to combat the Neo-Nazis in Germany. Nestled along the Danube in southern Germany, Passau is a pleasant tourist destination known for its historic buildings and scenic views at the intersection of three rivers. But for decades, the small Bavarian city suppressed an intimate association with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Passau is certainly a prime example of a charming town on the banks of the Danube which has to this day denied a very cruel and tragic past. This is a must read for anyone who is interested in the German war machine that systematically swept up millions in their killing machine. The best chapters are the ones that deal with Rasmus’ family history, including what her grandmother did in the Second World War.
Despite the praise she had earned around the world, officials and citizens of Passau continued to obstruct her work. In this memoir, Rosmus relives her turmoil over whether to stay in Passau or to leave; describes the more open-minded world she found in Washington D.C.; and discusses how she has been able to carry on her research from the United States. Earlier, in 1988, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, or the Night of the Broken Glass (the pogrom of 9–10 November 1938), the city of Passau had stubbornly refused to invite survivors of the Passau concentration camp. Instead, the citizens had decided to commemorate the occasion at the site of the heroes cemetery, or Heldenfriedhof, where, alongside five hundred SS soldiers, the body of General von Hassenstein lay buried. This, I now realize, should not have come as a surprise to me. After all, the few murdered Russians who had initially been buried there were later systematically exhumed and reburied in locations outside the city.
He had done so at the end of 1945 by physically confronting the SS man in charge of deportation, Hans Merbach, and demanding that he recall the order of execution by firing squad that was set to take place there in Nammering and immediately release the prisoners from the train cars in which they were being held. In addition, he had personally collected enough food from the people in his small community to feed the prisoners, of whom almost all were Jews, during the period that the train would remain in Nammering before leaving for Dachau. Many would nevertheless perish during the transport, but many others, who would have met a certain death by firing squad in Nammering, had him to thank for their lives. During the weeks and months that followed, American occupiers forced the population to disinter the mass graves, remove and clean the bodies, and then rebury them individually, properly in simple wooden coffins. The citizens were made to erect memorials and crosses, and plant flowers on the graves of the murdered.
Anna Rosmus was born in 1960 in the pleasant middle-class town of Passau. Aged 20 she began to realise that her hometown had a dark past, and was inextricably linked to the Nazi regime. When she began to investigate what had happened there during the war she met only hostility and a deep reluctance to face the facts. This motivated her to delve even deeper and it wasn’t long before she became a committed activist and has since devoted her life to revealing the atrocities perpetrated in her native town and surrounding area and to campaigning for the commemoration of all who suffered there. Legislative Resolution honoring "the tireless, courageous and often life-threatening efforts... against the acts and effects of racism, bigotry and hatred, remembering the warnings of a tragic and blackened history...to educate future generations" by the State of New York, in October 1992.
This book is the follow-up to her first memoir Against the Stream and is an extremely interesting account of Passau during the war as well as a chronicle of her own family. It’s another important addition to Holocaust literature, and one that is both readable and engaging, although inevitably heart-rending and frequently shocking. Among my favorite passages are Asmus's description of Elie Wiesel and her description of her new home.
They have refused to attend the conferences of the Jews who return to the camps which they survived. One man makes sordid toasts to the mothers of infants who were murdered and buried on his vacation land. Rather chilling description of the city that Hitler called home. It was the site of several concentration camps and was host to early Hitler rallies.
