How Halberstadt's erased Jewish past resurfaced after decades of silence

Halberstadt’s Jewish history was nearly erased after the Nazi era, yet traces of its past endured in unexpected ways. Between 1938 and 1942, the once-thriving Neo-Orthodox community was systematically destroyed, leaving only a handful of survivors by the 1960s. A new book by Philipp Graf, Rejected Legacy, now examines how this history was remembered—and often ignored—in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The destruction of Halberstadt’s synagogue during the pogrom night of November 1938 marked the violent beginning of the city’s Jewish erasure. By 1942, the community had been annihilated, and by 1961, Willy Calm remained the last known Jew in Halberstadt, serving as the official contact for what was left of its legacy.

In 1949, a memorial was built at the former Langenstein-Zwieberge concentration camp near Halberstadt to honour victims of forced labour. Two decades later, in 1969, the site was redesigned as a gathering place for political pledges of allegiance—constructed directly over the graves of prisoners. Meanwhile, the camp’s underground tunnels were repurposed in the 1950s as a military storage depot for the GDR’s National People’s Army. Despite official attempts to erase Jewish culture, fragments persisted. Lin Jaldati, a Dutch resistance fighter, moved to the GDR in 1952 and recorded three LPs in East Berlin before being erased from broadcasts after the 1967 Six-Day War. Novels by Peter Edel and Jurek Becker, published in the GDR, also kept Jewish heritage alive in literature, even as the state downplayed its existence. Decades later, the 2018 sale of Halberstadt’s Rathauspassagen triggered renewed controversy, with whispers of a 'sellout to the Jews'—prompting Graf’s investigation into the city’s unresolved past.

Graf’s book highlights the contradictions of the GDR’s antifascist claims while uncovering the suppressed history of Halberstadt’s Jews. The city’s past—from the destroyed synagogue to the repurposed camp tunnels—reveals how memory was shaped, buried, and occasionally resurrected. Today, these stories offer a clearer picture of what was lost and what somehow endured.