30.12.2022
Digital Handbook GURS – a search for traces
The SPURENSUCHE GURS [GURS – A SEARCH FOR TRACES] Digital Handbook is aimed at teachers, students, pupils, and local and regional researchers. It is also a practical resource for anyone wishing to prepare for a commemorative trip to Gurs or Auschwitz, for example. While based on years of academic research and educational practice, it has not been compiled in the style of an academic study.
The Handbook uses the example of Breisach to explore the fate of the Jews of Baden during the Nazi era. Through its exemplary character, it is also designed to provide incentives for research in other municipalities, especially in Baden. The Handbook focuses on the deportations to the Gurs camp in southern France in October 1940, yet it offers much more. To begin with, it presents the long history of the Jewish community as well as the significance of the ‘Blue House’. It then moves on to a précis of Breisach’s history under the Nazi regime and the gradual exclusion and persecution of the Jews, culminating in the November pogroms of 1938. Special aspects of Breisach are examined time and again, such as the evacuation of the population in 1939/40 due to the town’s wartime location on the border and the short-term ‘wild’ deportation of Jews to Rouffach in Alsace in the summer of 1940.
Digital Handbook PDF
