Yad Vashem and Marburg an der Lahn

The Press and Public Relations department of Marburg provided Yad Vashem with invaluable photographs for Marburg an der Lahn or Landkreis Marburg-Biedenkopf during the 1930's.

A student humiliated (passing over the 1892 Weidenhäuser Brücke on the Lahn linking Marburg old-town centre and Weidenhausen; incident dated 1933-08-24.) There is no note at the site as to the date when Marburg provided Yad Vashem with the photograph.

Today's missing synagogue.

Antisemitic parade in Marburg (photograph dated February 1936.).

The synagogue burning, Kristallnacht in Marburg.

My incidental notes:

Other references to KZ and Lager in the Marburg area.

Marburg Synagogue Rededicated, 1946 (not noted: tiny and not in old quarter; members are DP's and local war-time Allied military and others; note flags.)

Note: Marburg-Uni had been home to Otto Böckel and the rise of 19th Century antisemitism as a German political movement at a time when the great synagogue of 1897 was being built.

For the Marburg Uni's Center for Conflict Studies, see this English start-page.

The fate of forced labour in the area, the handicapped in the town hospital and others (the mentally ill, the retarded) is documented at the University of Minnesota and elsewhere.

For an Allied decision to bomb an asylum for the mentally-ill, see histories of Operation Market Garden and "The Great Mistake".  Allied failures to take prisoners among child troops is also reported during this military debacle to "end a war by Christmas".