Landsberg, with much of its old walls intact and a well-preserved town center, would be worth a visit on any grounds, but a visit to Landsberg also means encountering its unseen pasts during the Nazi era, a time which, for a while, it tried hard to forget.
This story is a bit personal because of my father's originally accidental connection with the town just after the war, and his later work with a local citizens' committee that has worked hard to ensure that the past is known and remembered.
The city's ornate secondary school, and the Singing and Music school
During the Nazi era, and a bit before it, Landsberg was center of attention for Hitler's fascist movement. He was imprisoned there in 1923 after attempting to seize power, and wrote his book Mein Kampf there. After his release, his cell became a pilgrimage site, and the town was named as the town of the Hitler Youth.
In the later stages of World War II, it was the center for a series of concentration camps, where 30,000 prisoners were brought to work in an underground aircraft factory; nearly half died under horrible conditions in the work-to-death camps before liberation.
If it feels a bit odd to be reading these words surrounded by the pretty pictures of the town, it's not a surprise to me. When I visited Landsberg last summer for the first time in over thirty years, I had moments like that. The Hotel Goggl, above, has roots going back centuries—but it's hard to forget it was a favorite with high-ranking Nazi visitors.
But that ambivalence is important and is a key piece of the town's 20th century history. When the camps were liberated in 1945, the U.S. commander made the local population observe the conditions and bury the dead... but by a few years later, there were no signs, no acknowledgement, and a widespread claim that 'no one had known.' It was a popular theme in Germany until the late 1960s.
Plenty of old towers, but the long path up to walk the walls was too much...
Landsberg played a role in changing that, too, when a local high school teacher, Anton Posset, and his students won a Bavarian state award for history writing for their research into the history of Landsberg in the 20th century. That became the impetus for Posset and others for form a citizens' committee to continue the work, and to create a memorial at one of the camp sites.
The brochure for the memorial at the former camp. Sorry for the wrinkles!
Landsberg's third encounter with 20th century history is a better tale than the Nazi pilgrimages or the concentration camps. At the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of displaced persons—former prisoners, former forced laborers, people whose countries no longer seemed a safe place to be—were cared for in a series of displaced persons' camps; a German army barracks in Landsberg became the largest of them, populated mainly by Jews from Eastern Europe.
A modern nook fitted into an old building
That's where my family's connection comes. My father, Irving Heymont, was, for several key months, in charge of the Landsberg camp. When he arrived, he helped change the army's attitude from keeping the DPs in to ensuring their free movement and helping them set up self-governing committees, schools and elections.
On a house said to have been inhabited by witches in the Middle Ages
In the late 1960s, Posset and the Citizens Committee, aware of his role with the DPs, reached out to him for help in finding U.S. Army archive material about Landsberg, including both German and U.S. Army video of the concentration camps. My father became closely involved with the group and made several trips to meet with them.
Some playful statuary at a cafe and in a fountain
While doing so, he became aware that while the Nazi-era history was becoming known, the story of the Displaced Persons camp, which closed in 1950, wasn't well-known. The base itself was in use by NATO and the German Air Force. He arranged for a memorial plaque on the outer wall of the base.
In the 1990s, the base, including the area that had been used by the DPs, was rebuilt as a new housing area, and the wall demolished. The plaque was moved to a new monument near the former headquarters building. One of the streets in the new development was named for him at a ceremony he attended.
At the corner, with my daughter Andrea
Church of the Assumption, the town's largest church
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