Alsfeld ruthless!The last Jewess is expelled

What a bureaucratic, sober report of completion, if one retrospectively includes the fate of the affected people and fellow citizens in the assessment! At the end of an eight-year development, the last note in a four-page “General Protocol” of December 4, 1941, reads: “Alsfeld is now free of Jews. The background was the law of April 30, 1939 on tenancies with Jews. It was only one of 42 laws, ordinances and decrees between 1933 and 1943 aimed at the systematic disparagement of Jewry and the expulsion of Jews from Germany.

After the Nazis seized power in 1933, the first Jewish families began to emigrate, mainly to America and Palestine. The Jewish population in Alsfeld at that time was almost four percent. Jewish stores and businesses, Jewish merchants, doctors and lawyers as well as participation of Jews in public life were part of normality.

At the end of 1940, the departures were completed except for two. Selma Rothschild, widow of Joseph Rothschild, a brushmaker still born in Angenrod, is the last Jew living in the house at Amthof 2. In November 1941 she moves to Bad Nauheim. After deportation she dies in 1943 in the concentration camp Theresienstadt. NH