Pieces of the Munich synagogue, destroyed on Hitler’s orders, found in River

Eighty-five years ago, Munich’s main synagogue was demolished on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler – a terrible harbinger of devastation to come.

The synagogue was one of the first Jewish places of worship to be destroyed in Hitler’s Germany. Five months later, the Nazis staged nationwide pogroms and destroyed most of the country’s synagogues, as well as Jewish cultural institutions and businesses.

Munich’s main synagogue was lost to history, or so it seemed. But this week, during a project to refurbish old underwater infrastructure, a construction crew found pieces of the synagogue in a river five miles from where it once stood in Munich. The discovery was a shock, but a joyful one for Munich’s Jewish community.

The items that construction workers found, including columns and a large piece of the synagogue’s Torah shrine, were 15 to 24 feet (4.5 to 7.5 meters) below the surface of the Isar River at a site south of Munich. The remains of the building were used as landfill material when workers rebuilt an underwater structure after flooding in 1956.

“I knew the imposing building as a child before it was demolished, and I never imagined that parts of it would have survived the destruction, let alone resurface nearly a century later,” said Charlotte Knobloch, the chairman of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, in an email.

While Munich leaders are happy to see pieces of the synagogue resurfaced, the discovery also sheds another spotlight on the horrific actions of the Nazis, who not only murdered six million Jews, but also systematically destroyed Jewish life.

The newly found relics illustrate important points, Bernhard Purin, the director of the Jewish Museum in Munich, explained in an interview. “On the one hand, they document the flourishing Jewish life in Munich before 1933,” he said. “On the other hand, they are a monument to its destruction.”

Completed in 1887, the synagogue was designed to blend in with Munich’s architectural style. A newspaper review at the time called it a “decoration of the city.”

Hitler ordered it destroyed in June 1938 after visiting the neighborhood days before. Officially it has been removed to make way for a parking lot. The company responsible for the demolition stored the rubble in its yard until it was used to reinforce river infrastructure in the mid-1950s.

Now a stone sculpture between a luxury department store and a BMW museum reminds passers-by where the synagogue once stood.

“Today we are as surprised to see fragments of the old main synagogue resurfaced as we are shocked at the disrespect with which they were treated even after 1945,” Ms Knobloch wrote.

Before 1938, almost every major German city had a synagogue. Most of these temples were destroyed in November 1938 during the so-called pogroms Kristallnacht. The few who survived were spared because they were too close to non-Jewish buildings to be demolished by the Nazis.

Aerial bombardments during World War II left many German cities in ruins, leaving the remains of many destroyed synagogues gone forever. Fragments of another synagogue in Frankfurt in the 1980s sparked continued protests to prevent the city from building on the site. Eventually, the remains were put under glass in Frankfurt for visitors to view.

This week, Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter said in a statement that the destruction of the Munich synagogue marked the “beginning of exclusion, persecution and destruction” of German Jews. “The fact that today we find remains of the once city-defining magnificent building is a stroke of luck and touches me deeply,” he continued.

Now that officials know what was hidden in the underwater debris, an estimated 150 tons will be transferred to a city yard to be carefully examined for more pieces of the synagogue – a job that could take years.