GERMANY: ZWIEFALTEN

 May 22, 2025  

On our way from Grafeneck to Zwiefalten, we stopped to take a photo of a bar/inn where the Grafeneck staff came to relax, have a drink, or perhaps rent a room if overflow housing was needed. Today, this charming restaurant exhibits no evidence of its past, and I suppose it is a good example of the fact that life must go on.

Zwiefalten is a tranquil village of about 2,300 people in the Swabian region of southern Germany about 70 miles southeast of my mother's hometown of Pforzheim. The skyline is dominated by the twin towers of the Abbey of Our Lady of Zwiefalten, a former Benedictine monastery founded in 1089.

In 1812 part of the property became a lunatic asylum and then later a psychiatric hospital.

Zwiefalten State Hospital and Sanitorium was the last place my grandfather was held before he was transported to Grafeneck. Of the 10,654 people gassed at Grafeneck, more than 1,000 came from Zwiefalten. Once Grafeneck was shut down in December 1940, killings by injection continued at Zwiefalten.

This distance from Zwiefalten to Grafeneck is about 14 miles and takes just under 25 minutes to drive. Perhaps it took the gray transport busses a little longer in 1940, and certainly the patients who were passengers in the bus did not know where they were going.

We began our vist to Zwiefalten at the Württemberg Museum of Psychiatry. Apparently the psychiatric clinic at Zwiefalten is the oldest in the state of Baden-Württemberg.

GERMANY: GRAFENECK

 May 21, 2025

This post is one of the hardest ones I think I have ever written. The subject matter is difficult, and six months out, I find I am still trying to process this day's events, both those that happened in 2025 and those that occurred exactly 85 years earlier in 1940.

Everyone has heard of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Sobibor, and other concentration camps, but I am guessing that very few Americans are familiar with Bernberg, Hadamar, Brandenburg, Hartheim, Sonnenstein, and--the one that matters most to me and my siblings--Grafeneck. Each of these were "extermination centers" that were part of the Nazi Aktion T4 program. 

Aktion T4 preceded the concentration camps extermination program, and in fact was a foundation for the killing methods used in the camps and the beginning of the systematic mass murder system that led to the Holocaust. Its goal was to rid Germany of "life unworthy of life," the mentally ill and disabled. 

A propaganda poster in the Grafeneck Memorial
Documentation Center showing a strong German trying
to "support" two mentally ill creatures and noting that
supporting a handicapped person until the age of 60
costs 50,000 Reichsmarks.

Victims were brought against their will and generally without the knowledge of their families to one of the six facilities I listed above. There they were gassed using carbon monoxide, which took about 20 minutes--a much slower process than the Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide) gas later used in the concentration camps--and their bodies were cremated. The Nazis called these "mercy deaths." Families were notified that their relative died of some randomly chosen but plausible cause, and often a container of indiscriminate ashes was sent to the family. 

GERMANY: GIENGEN

 May 20, 2025

Halfway into this trip, Bob and I and my sister Chris and her husband Stan met up in Giengen, Germany, with the rest of my siblings (three more), two of their spouses, a cousin, and a nephew for a total of eleven family members. What a blast! 

Giengen is where my mother was born. In fact, I can work my way up the family tree and find the following births in Giengen: my mother's mother (1895), her father (1848), his father (1817), his father (1785) AND mother (1793). both sets of their parents (1748, 1760, 1759, 1761), and five more generations before that dating back to as early as 1585! Pretty incredible. 

Giengen is located in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg less than 20 miles from the much larger and more famous city of Ulm. Today, Giengen has a population of around 20,000, but it seems to always have been somewhat of a sleepy city, and as we walked around, it felt like it had a population of about 500.

Giengen's claim to fame is that it is the home of the toy stuffed animal factory Steiff, founded in 1880 by Margarete Steiff (1847-1909). Confined to a wheelchair because her legs had been paralyzed by polio as a child, she took up sewing and began making stuffed toys for friends, then opened her own store in 1877. In 1902, her company began making stuffed bears with movable joints. The bears took off in the United States. Some sources claim they were nicknamed after the then President Teddy Roosevelt, becoming the first "teddy bear," but other sources credit a political cartoon and a Brooklyn candy store owner with creating the nickname and the first bear. The two events appear to have occurred simultaneously.

While most cities have a statue of a king or famous political or religious figure in the town center, Giengen has a teddy bear (or two). 

What looked something like a Chamber of Commerce building had this image in the window. It translates to "Capital of Teddy Bears, Giengen on the Brenz [River]."

GERMANY: AN OLD POST, A NEW FRIEND, AND MANY LITTLE MIRACLES

 May 2025

And now I come to the part of the story of this trip to Germany that is nothing short of a miracle.

The very beginning of the story (if there is such a thing as a beginning of any story) was 85 years ago near a castle on the top of a rather remote hill in Southern Germany, but my part of it began just 25 years ago in December 2000 when Bob and I took our two sons, ages 15 and 12, to Europe with two objectives in mind: pick up our daughter from her study abroad program in France and spend time with my mother in Germany. 

Mom, our daughter, our sons, and I in the
Pforzheim cemetery, December 2000

My mother grew up in Pforzheim, a city that was bombed on February 23, 1945, killing 17,600 people, which was over 30% of the town's population. We met up with her in her hometown, spent the day seeing places that had been important to her, and then moved on to other cities in Southern Germany.