Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Klaus Beer

Leonberg, Baden-Württemberg

As a child in the city of Ulm, Klaus Beer was fed the usual Nazi propaganda about Jews being “subhuman.” And he did not question it. He wanted to join the Hitler Youth like his peers. “Everyone had a nice uniform, but not me. My father would not let me join. And so I thought, why not me? Children don’t want to be different. And my father told me early on, ‘The Third Reich is a crime.’ And I also knew even as a child that it was dangerous for him to say such things.”

In April 1945, American troops occupied Ulm. “And you could finally feel free to talk. That’s when my father told me about his mother. He didn’t want to burden me with it before, because people everywhere were saying that the Jews were the worst subhumans ever. You don’t want to hear that your grandmother is one of them, but then he said, ‘Your grandmother Elise was Jewish!’”

“I was shocked,” says Beer, who was 12 at the time. “It took a while for me to absorb. In the Third Reich we had been brainwashed in one direction. After the war, I had to unlearn everything they had taught me in school about people, and I found out that reality is quite different. It took a while.”

This stark realization caused him to focus on democratic values throughout his career as a lawyer and judge. But only after he retired in 1994 was he able to pursue the goal of finding his own Jewish roots and establishing connections with Jews who had fled Nazi Germany.

The results are impressive: In 1997, he published a portrait of his grandmother, who died of natural causes in 1941: Elise Beer geborene Cohen: Grossmutter. This was followed in 2001 by his larger work: a portrait of Elise Beer’s entire family, the Cohens of Osterholz-Scharmbeck in Lower Saxony. Beer also has written numerous essays on the trials against the Nazi mobile killing squads, “The Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trials of 1958” (which he observed as a young lawyer); and educational publications on topics related to local post-war anti-Semitism: “Auf den Feldern von Ulm” (In the fields of Ulm), 2008.

Beer was born in Hamburg and spent a lot of time with his Jewish grandmother Elise at family gatherings. In 1943, his immediate family moved to Ulm to avoid Allied air raids.

After the war, little was said in school about war crimes. In 1958, as a young lawyer in Ulm, Beer learned details about the mass shootings of Jews in Eastern Europe, attending the first German trial against the Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing units. But he “still did not know that a part of my own family was also killed this way.”

Beer became the Chief Judge of the district court of Stuttgart (Vorsitzender Richter am Landgericht), on the Supreme Court (Oberlandes Gericht), and was founder and national chairman (for six years) of the New Judges Association (Neuen Richter Vereinigung).

In the 1970s, as a judge handling reparations cases for people who had suffered persecution under the Nazis, Beer pored over many life stories – mostly of Jews. He became familiar with the history in general. But the story of his own family was still a mystery. This all changed in 1994, after his retirement, when Beer began digging into archives and libraries, including the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin.

All he had to go on was the name of his grandmother. He ended up finding – and meeting – distant relatives in the USA and Holland. He visited cemeteries and interviewed residents of Osterholz-Scharmbeck, Lower Saxony – where his Jewish relatives had lived. Ultimately, Beer traced the family back back to the 18th century.

He found that his relatives had done “everything to be part of German society. They were Jewish Germans,” says Beer. “They fought in World War I for the Kaiser, they spoke only German, their gravestones were only in German. But there was nothing they could do.”

Nineteen of his relatives were murdered. In fact, only two Jews from Osterholz-Scharmbeck who had not fled Germany survived the Holocaust.

Beer visited the killing fields of Belarus and the memorial at Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic. In November 2002, he traveled to Minsk for the dedication of a memorial to the Jews who had been deported from the Bremen region to the ghetto exactly 61 years before.

Four years later, Beer helped establish a memorial to the 22 murdered Jews from his ancestral town, on the site of the former 19th century synagogue. Concurrently, an exhibit on local Jewish history was shown in the town hall.

Beer’s research also took him deeper into the wartime history of Leonberg, the town to which he and his wife, Linde, moved in 1970. Leonberg was the site of an SS concentration camp where prisoners were forced to work for the armaments industry. In 1999, Beer helped found a memorial initiative there.

His first personal contact with long-lost family was in 2000. They have often visited one another since. With amazement, Beer notes how his distant cousin and nominator, Harriet Zuckerman, who was born in the U.S., still speaks the Hamburg German that she learned from her grandmother. The first trip to Germany by Zuckerman– before she met Beer – was difficult. She was afraid to come here. But today she says many Germans have tried very hard to atone for what their parents and grandparents did. “It is good to know that there are people who care.”

For Beer, his journey began with his father’s revelation to him, in the spring of 1945. The days of denial and silence are long over. “Most people who had a Jewish grandmother or grandfather did not speak about it,” he recalls. “Because if you talked about your Jewish roots, people’s behavior toward you changed; they pushed you aside and marginalized you.”

“I feel much freer than I did in past decades, thanks to my work on Jewish history and the history of my family.” And he has touched the lives of many others. Says his rediscovered cousin Zuckerman: “I have a history, I belong to somebody and he did this.”