It’s a grey, chill day in November 2023. My wife Anne and I have ventured to Lohhof, a district of Unterschleissheim, a far-flung dormitory suburb of Munich. It’s not exactly tourist territory. The friendly local who helped us make sure we had the right S-Bahn ticket from central Munich had never heard of it.
The reason we’re here is because of a badly faded photocopy dated 2 April 1965. It’s part of a sworn statement made for my mother Ruth in her compensation case against the Bavarian government for the losses the family had incurred under the Nazis while living in Dachau. The statement concerns my grandmother, Vera Neumeyer (murdered, probably in Auschwitz in 1942). This was given in German by family friend and Dachau resident Aranka Wirsching. Most of the script is now illegible but the word Lohhof is there. “She told me that she had to walk to Lohhof and there had to do manual work. She didn’t tell me about language lessons… [rest of text illegible, on a faded photocopy].“
Lohhof was one of some three hundred places in and around Munich where Jews and others persecuted by the Nazis were made to do slave labour (Zwangsarbeit). A number of Poles who were deported with my grandmother Vera Neumeyer on 13 July 1942 were also working here, and she mentions in a letter that she is learning Polish from some of them. Only a couple of months earlier in 2023 I spot that statement from Aranka Wirsching. After some googling, I then find out that in September 2023, only a few weeks before our visit, a memorial site has been inaugurated at Lohhof, in a modern industrial estate.
I have arranged to meet Veronika Leikauf here. She works at the Munich City Museum and is in charge of the Lohhof memorial project and fills us in with the details. Little was known about the site until about ten years ago when an archive in Berlin revealed the extend of slave labour at Lohhof. There’s now a series of nicely set out and very informative display boards with photos and captions in German. The footway from the station to the former factory site is now a Path of Remembrance, paved with tiny pieces of blue concrete depicting flax flowers, and edging the pavement are metal plates bearing names of some of those forced to work there. Veronika points out the surviving tower and gateway of the otherwise vanished flax factory. We can’t go beyond the entrance, as it’s a private business.
The project isn’t yet complete. Doubtless more names of those who underwent slave labour will emerge – in fact three of the Poles who were deported with Vera are recorded in the Munich archive as being installed at Lohhof aren’t yet listed on the project’s website, in addition to Vera herself.
One of dozens of flower motifs in the pavement marking the route forced labourers took from the railway station to the flax factory at Lohhof. [Click on the arrow to advance the slideshow if you are viewing on a computer rather than a phone] 
Memorial information boards near the station 
Historic photo of the Lohhof flax factory on one of the information boards 
A portion of rail track that once served the flax factory 
Veronika and I outside the gate pillars to the former flax factory, with the original tower behind us 
Flax newly planted by the final information board
The flax-processing factory opened in 1935 and operated until 1945. Some 200 Munich Jews and 68 Jewish women from the Łódź in Poland ghetto were brought in to work there in summer 1941. In the autumn they were deported and murdered, and the following winter were replaced by others, including men and women from Poland and the Soviet Union.
They had to pluck the flax, soak it in cold water to soften it up and ferment, loosen the fibres from the woody core and chop them up for processing into yarn which was used for a variety of purposes – including uniforms, backpacks tents and ropes for the Wehrmacht and from it oil was extracted for use in the German navy. It was nasty work, very hard on the hands. The workers were there for long hours and beatings were regular. Vera ended up being deported on a Straftransport (‘penal transport’), very probably because she was too weak to work.
They were given a very meagre pay or else nothing in return for the rough existence that constituted ‘board and lodging’, and regularly beaten by the foremen and by the German women who worked there. Transgressions could result in death, and no contact was allowed with the public, who must have been aware of the labourers living on camp and arriving by train daily.
The manager would select older or weaker forced labourers for deportation. By autumn 1942 the Jewish forced labour was disbanded and replaced by workers from elsewhere.
Conditions for those forced to work here were harsh in the extreme. Some 90 workers were housed in a barracks on site but others had to travel in – they were not allowed to ride the tram, so had to undertake a long walk to the station in Munich: some Jewish forced labourers travelled from the assembly camp of Milbertshofen. One survivor reminisced that she had to walk five to six hours in addition to the long working day. ‘In the evening I just fall into bed, I’m so tired. Hopefully it won’t take too long, because I can’t go on for much longer.’
The Lohhof memorial website denkmal-lohhof.de has a wealth of information and photos of the flax factory.
There’s work underway to increase awareness of the 300 or so places where slave labour was carried out under the Nazis. Not a lot is known about many of them. Certainly local people would have been aware of the fact that people were being brought in as labourers on a daily basis.
Berg-am-Laim: where Vera spent her last Munich days
That afternoon we cross over Munich to emerge at Josephsburg U-Bahn station, in the eastern suburb of Berg-am-Laim. Near here, the former Kloster der Barmherzigen Schwestern (Sisters of Mercy) monastery, which was used by the Nazis as one of two assembly camps in the city (the other being Milbertshofen) for those awaiting eventual deportation.
I’ve been steered here by two bits of information. First, the Munich City Archive website, which states that Julius Kohn, the Neumeyers’ lodger and friend who was known to the family as ‘Onki’, was incarcerated here from 29 June 1942. And second, a letter from Vera dated 10 July 1942, three days before her deportation, stating ‘We’re leaving on Monday morning. Onki is here, but put on reserve.’ That confirms Onki – Julius Kohn – and Vera were in the same place: the Sisters of Mercy Monastery in Clemens August Strasse, Berg-am-Laim.
We don’t have precise dates as to when Vera was working at Lohhof, and when she was moved from the apartment she was sharing with the Köbner family at Thorwaldsenstrasse, in the western suburbs, to this assembly camp. She was also at some time doing slave labour in a market garden in the southern suburbs.
A typed Nazi document records that of the 50 who were deported on 13 July 1942, 27 were at Clemens August Strasse and six were actually living in the barracks at Lohhof. Vera’s address is still given as Thorwaldsenstrasse, where she had been since late 1938 or early 1939, but in the light of the article quoted above this does not seem to be correct, and she had moved – perhaps only days before her deportation – to Clemens August Strasse.
We wander along the narrow street, and St Michael’s Church (Pfarrkirche St-Michael) comes into view. Only when we reach the entrance do we spot the former gateway, an art nouveau structure – presumably dating from around 1900. It’s blocked by a huge stone cube and we notice the Star of David carved in the bottom corner with the dates 1941-43. There’s no explanation about what it is. No one is around, but others have placed stones on the top as a memorial, so I do the same.
Inside the grounds, the former monastery buildings now house a home for the elderly. In the middle is the church: the door is open and inside is a real surprise – a magnificent baroque interior by the great church designer Johann Michael Fischer. The whole place seems almost bizarrely benign in its tranquility: not a hint of what happened there during 1941-43.
The poignancy of a mere street sign: Clemens-August Strasse, where hundreds were detained between 1941 and 1943 
Approaching the former Sisters of Mercy monastery 
The memorial outside the monastery grounds: a huge stone cube blocking the former entrance 
Detail on the memorial: a Star of David with the dates 1941-43 
Next to the stone memorial, this plaque remembers Dr Else Behrend Rosenfeld, who worked as a Jewish social worker and was in charge at Clemens-August Strasse. Fearing deportation, she went underground in Berlin in 1942, then fled to Switzerland, where she published her diary in 1945, describing her experiences under the Nazis 
The Sisters of Mercy monastery, Clemens-August Strasse, Berg-am-Laim. It is now a retirement home. 
The monastery church, with decoration by the renowned baroque architect Fischer
Alois Weiner: the great mutual friend
My uncle Raymond wrote to his sister (my mother) Ruth while stationed with the British army in Germany – he managed to get leave to visit Munich and Dachau in November 1946. While there he went to visit Alois Weiner in Moosburg and the two of them got on very well. It was the first time they had met.
Alois, Raymond recorded in a letter to Ruth, was with Vera’s husband Hans and her father Martin in Theresienstadt. Only Alois survived.
I look at that very long letter of Raymond’s from November 1946: one important detail has until now eluded me – ‘Er erzählte mir vieles über Mutter – er hat mit ihr vor der Deportierung in Lohhof arbeiten müssen.’ – ‘he (Alois) tells me a lot about Mother – he was made to work with her in Lohhof before deportation’. So they were both there, together: further confirmation that she was there.
Alois was from Moosburg in Bavaria, and survived Theresienstadt, returning to his home town after liberation in 1945, where he took part in the democratic reconstruction of municipality and became deputy mayor. He died in 1953.
The Munich city archive records that he was at the Sisters of Mercy monastery in Berg-am-Laim immediately before being deported to Theresienstadt.
So that leads me to think this is how it happened: Alois meets Vera, originally either at Lohhof or the Sisters of Mercy Monastery in Berg-am-Laim. They were both at both places, but I don’t know which came first. Vera learns that she will be deported to somewhere in Poland, so starts learning Polish from some of the Poles in Lohhof. She knows also that Alois will be deported five days later than her to Theresienstadt, in Czechoslovakia, where her former husband Hans was deported the previous month (Vera and Hans divorced in 1941; Hans was having an affair with his secretary Dela, but he and Vera still seem to be on good terms). He is blind so Vera asks Alois to look out for him in Theresienstadt. This Alois does; he is with Hans in the final days of Hans’ life in 1944, and writes to a mutual family friend Gustav Güldenstein after the war with the news of Hans’ death. Alois returns some of Hans’ possessions to Dela, who passes them on to the family. These are two photos of the children (presumably to show to other people, as Hans could not see them) and an extraordinary poem written by his blind sister Irma in Theresienstadt in 1943 which I found among the family papers in 2022.
Back in 2021, when I didn’t know about Vera being at Lohhof with Alois, I made a 11-minute talk about Alois Weiner where I’ve explored the links between him and my grandparents Vera and Hans: you can listen to it here.
Although Hans and Vera had tragic fates, it’s very good to know Alois Weiner touched them with his humanity.
The Ephraims and the Neumeyers 