City walk Telgte

In Telgte there is evidence of a Jewish population since the first half of the 16th century. Over time, the small Jewish community grew to a few dozen members. Some of the Jewish families settled in Telgte lived from money lending and trade. They were not allowed to join the Christian guilds. The marketplace was the place where they could pursue their work.

The monument on the square commemorates the town messenger and crier Heinrich Sauerland. In 1892 he received an assignment from Telgte Amtmann Franz Schirmer: he was to go from house to house and ask the Telgte citizens* to protest with their signatures against the founding of an anti-Semitic association. This first documented citizens' survey was signed by 173 families, a good third of the citizens*. The anti-Semite association was founded by some Telgte citizens despite this action, but without any prolonged or successful activity.

This small, inconspicuous half-timbered building, which had its old pointed roof until about 1970, was rightly listed years ago because it is one of the oldest buildings in Telgte (built around 1500). Its history reflects 500 years of Telgte's urban development. Used as a storehouse for a good 200 years, the building was extended by its Jewish owners around 1740 and served as a synagogue and school for the community, which had grown to eight families. In the mid-19th century, the congregation numbered about 80 members, and after long planning and problems of financing, a new synagogue was built on Königstraße in 1875. The family of Jakob Auerbach bought the old synagogue and set up their butcher shop there, which they operated until 1938. The association Remembrance and Remembrance would like to develop this historic house into a museum for the history of the Jews*Jewesses in Telgte.

Through the Pumpenpatt one reaches the house at Steinstraße 4, where the family of Jakob Auerbach lived for over 200 years. Five Stolpersteine, which were laid there in 2004 by the association "Spuren finden" in the presence of survivors of the family, bear witness to the fate of this long-established Telgte family: Jakob, his sister Fanny and son Kurt were murdered in Lodz, son Erich died after the death march from Auschwitz, and his aunt Klara perished in Izbica. Only the son Alfred, born in 1923, was able to emigrate to Palestine at the age of sixteen in 1939. In 1988, on the occasion of the 750th anniversary of the town and the 50th commemoration of the pogrom night, he was the guest of honor of the town of Telgte. In conversation with schoolchildren, he recounted his experiences at the time. A tape recording makes this clear in a moving way.

In front of this house are two Stolpersteine for the married couple Hermann and Johanna Auerbach, who were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 and murdered there. The two neighboring houses to the right and left were home to the families of Hermann, Max and Moritz Auerbach, who were highly respected in Telgte. Together they ran a cattle trading business with its own office at the Essen wholesale market. Max and Moritz died in 1935 and 1936. Hermann and Johanna Auerbach had made it possible for their daughters Ilse and Margot to emigrate to the USA in 1938, while they themselves were later denied this opportunity. Their large property was forcibly sold, they had to leave their home and found a new place to stay with relatives in Hildesheim in 1940. In March 1942 they were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto together with about 1000 Jews from Lower Saxony. A last sign of life, a Red Cross card dated June 8, 1942, reached their daughters in the U.S.

At Ritterstraße corner Judengängsken is a triple memorial. In this place stood the synagogue, built in 1875, whose entrance was somewhat hidden on this alley. The bronze plaque from 1981 is the first memorial in Telgte commemorating the Nazi atrocities. The pogrom in Telgte did not occur until November 10/11, 1938, because the head of the labor service stationed in Telgte, Robert Weber, refused to "cold" demolish the synagogue on the orders of the SA. Now the SA men had to implement the destruction themselves 
. The Mildenberg family lived in the synagogue and lost all their belongings. The Stolpersteine for Siegfried and Henriette Mildenberg and their foster child Karl-Heinz Steinhardt commemorate their fate. After a stopover in Hanover, the family was deported to Riga on December 15, 1941, on one of the first deportation trains and murdered there. The memorial stele was unveiled in 2013, 75 years after the pogrom, by the association Erinnerung und Mahnung with great participation from the people of Telgte. It commemorates the synagogue, and the names and dates of 13 victims of Nazi terror.

The magistrates of the cities stipulated in their ordinances that the burial places of the Jews*Jewesses always had to be outside the city walls. To the left of the stone gate, the first Jewish cemetery was located outside the walls on the rampart since about 1600. At the end of the 18th century, the Telgte people demolished their fortifications, and despite the complaints and fierce resistance of the Jewish population their cemetery was destroyed. Around 1820, the community received this area at Wallock as a new burial place for their dead. In 1941 the mayor reported Telgte as "free of Jews". The city bought the cemetery in 1942 for 400 Reichsmark and had the gravestones, grave borders and the man-high wall removed in order to use the material to repair the flood damage to the Emswehr. The area was leased as an orchard.

The tombstones installed at the large Ems weir behind the Clemens Church lie under a thick concrete cover and cannot be recovered. Since 2005, a memorial plaque commemorates these events:  "In this weir, gravestones from the desecrated Jewish cemetery Telgte were built in 1942 as filling material."

Only the gravestones of the three last buried, Leni Auerbach (1932), Hermann Auerbach (1935) and Moritz Auerbach (1936), were recovered after the war in the cellar of the burned party house, and still in the year 1945 on the cemetery again set up. Hermann Auerbach was later reburied in Münster.

In 2005, the association "Remembrance and Reminder" redesigned the cemetery in its current form and handed it over to the Jewish community of Münster. On a stele, the names of those buried here have been brought back into the memory of the urban community.