The Forgotten Coat

This was a lecture in the series "Freiburg en détail: Eine Kulturgeschichte in Objekten" of the Studium Generale at Freiburg University in the Winter Semester 2025/2026. Dr. Julia Wohlrab, Director of the Dokumentationszentrum Nationalsozialismus, had chosen as the object "The Forgotten Coat."

The bronze coat left behind lies on the railing leading up to the Wiwili Bridge, which spans the tracks at Freiburg main station. A bronze plaque with the following text explaining the monument is affixed to the wall below.

On October 22, 1940, more than 450 Jewish citizens from Freiburg and the surrounding area were deported from the freight depot of the former train station to the Gurs camp in southern France on the orders of the Nazi regional leadership. Many of them perished in Gurs from starvation and disease; most were murdered in the Auschwitz extermination camp.

City of Freiburg, October 2003

The express freight handling facility on a siding at the Freiburg Central Station

An eyewitness recalls the events in her youth, "From our school, the Hindenburg School [now the Goethe Gymnasium], we saw people being loaded onto trucks. Somehow, everyone knew they were Jews. And one of my classmates said, 'This is the best day of my life - the Jews are finally leaving.' Another classmate also saw people being loaded onto trucks at the Martinstor. Of course, it was the same in other streets as well. People saw this and were indifferent. The Jews were considered less than animals - vermin, parasites, as they were always called. Many were delighted. People were mostly even more malicious than the laws."

Only a few photos - none in Freiburg - captured the moment when Jews were arrested prior to their deportation to Gurs.

Children watch as Jews are loaded onto military trucks in Kippenheim.

There is a charcoal drawing of Freiburg by Fritz Löw, which he created in Gurs.
On the police truck are prisoners, including a boy

Gauleiters Wagner and Bürckel had planned this deportation so ...

Hitler receives visitors at his headquarters in Hornisgrinde in the Black Forest during the French Campaign.
In the photo, from left to right: Josef Bürckel, (?), Martin Bormann (?), Robert Wagner, Adolf Hitler,
and Hitler's valet Heinz Linge.

... that they could proudly report to their Führer on October 23, 1940: Der Oberrhein ist als erster Gau des Reiches judenrein (The Upper Rhine is the first Gau in the Reich to be free of Jews).

Public auctions in Freiburg ...

... and Lörrach

No sooner had the Jews been deported than their former property was sold off.

Among those deported were the Leifmann siblings from Goethestraße 33: Robert, Else, and Martha. While Robert died in Gurs, his sisters survived and lived in Zurich until their deaths.

As early as June 7, 1954, Else Liefmann urged the promotion of a culture of remembrance in Freiburg in a letter sent from Zurich to Mayor Wolfgang Hoffmann, "The fact that Freiburg has not - or not yet - decided to erect such a memorial is, for Jews or Christians living abroad - to the latter group of whom I also belong - a sad testament to how indifferent, how forgetful so many Germans are toward that memory which they would prefer to erase, as if nothing had happened. Yes, we who come from abroad ask ourselves whether such an attitude does not express a fear of those many who still - or once again today - adhere to the spirit of the Thousand-Year Reich in Germany, and against whom the authorities themselves are perhaps divided in their sentiments and apparently too weak?"

Aleksandra Assmann writes about forgetting in her book Forms of Forgetting: "Not remembering, but forgetting, is the foundation of human and social life. Remembering is the negation of forgetting and generally entails an effort, a rebellion, a veto against time and the course of events. Just as cells are replaced in the body of an organism, so too are objects, ideas, and individuals periodically replaced in society. Forgetting happens silently, unspectacularly, and everywhere. Remembering, by contrast, is the probable exception, based on certain conditions." 

Here stood the synagogue of Freiburg's Israelite community, built in 1870 
and destroyed on November 10, 1938, under a regime of violence and injustice.

It was not until 1961 that the city of Freiburg erected a memorial stone at the site where the old synagogue had stood until Kristallnacht.

With all the troubled water, the text on the memorial plaque is difficult to read.

The memorial stone is set into a water surface on the Square of the Old Synagogue. The outline of the surface represents the floor plan of the synagogue building that was burned down on November 10, 1938.

On the 60th anniversary of the deportation, October 2, 2000, the citizens of Freiburg donated
 this commemorative plaque, which provides extensive information about the Wagner-Bürckel Action.

On October 22, 1940, within a few hours, 6,504 Jewish men, women, and children from Baden and the Palatinate were taken to central assembly camps and deported by transport trains to the Gurs camp in southern France. The oldest of the deportees was 97 years old. Among them were also about 300 Jewish citizens from Freiburg.

Only a few of those imprisoned in the camp were saved. Starting in August 1942, most of them—provided they had not already died of starvation and disease in Gurs itself—were deported to the extermination camps in the East, primarily to Auschwitz and Majdanek. Over 5,200 of those deported to Gurs died as victims of violence.

Too many looked the other way back then; too few resisted. This must not and will not be repeated.

Freiburg's new synagogue on Engelstraße

The commemorative plaque at the new synagogue cites Job 16:18 "O earth, cover not thou my blood, and let my cry have no place." and reads: Under the Nazi dictatorship, on October 22, 1940, the Jewish citizens of the city of Freiburg were deported to Gurs in southern France. The city remembers with shame and sorrow, Freiburg, October 22, 1990.

The city of Bad Nauheim incorporated the symbol of the forgotten coat into its memorial bearing the names of the city's Holocaust victims.

 
In the ensuing discussion, someone asked how one could explain that a deportee who was wearing his coat in the autumn month of October could have so easily forgotten it?

The name "Forgotten Coat" for the memorial has caught on among the people of Freiburg. That is why Red Baron suggested trying "The Left-Behind Coat."

The coat was left behind by a deportee, intentionally or unintentionally, as a memento.

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