Returning Jews and Local Communities Worked Together to Lead Germany Toward Historical Reckoning
Hugo Spiegel and then-mayor Dr. Hans Kluck unveiling the memorial stone in 1970. An English translation of the inscription (which comes from Lamentations 1:16), reads, in part:
Over these things I weep/ My eyes run with water/ Because Menachem is far from me.: Courtesy of the town of Warendorf. by Helmut Walser Smith |
January 11, 2021
In the early postwar years in the German town of Warendorf, no one contributed as much to facing the difficult past as Hugo Spiegel. He was not a learned man. He was Jewish, however. And his story tells us something important about how German communities confronted their history.