BACKGROUND

HELEN DAVIS

Foreign Correspondent

A

nna Rosmus is the
very model of a
modern Bavarian
woman. At age 30, this
mother of two is blond, viva-
cious and articulate. She is
also very bright, with a clut-
ch of certificates and prizes
to prove it.
While still at school, Anna
won two national essay
prizes, and her early promise
was subsequently confirmed
by the two highly acclaimed
books she has had published
since, one winning Ger-
many's prestigious
Geschwister-Scholl book
prize.
Anna Rosmus is honored
by her country, yet in
Passau (pop: 50,000), the pic-
turesque "Lederhosen"
German town close to the
Austrian border where she
lives, she is reviled, a pariah
who suffers nightly phone
threats, an avalanche of
hate mail, verbal abuse and
physical attack. Even her
husband left her for
"shaming" him and their
town.
Passau, like so many other
large and small towns in
Germany, has a history, and
Anna's great crime has been
to expose that past. It was in
Passau that Adolf Eichmann
was married and first
dreamt of deporting the
Jews to gas chambers; where
Nazi ideologue Julius
Streicher was born; where
Hitler himself lived briefly
as a child.
Anna's crime has been not
only to recall that legacy,
but also to peel open the
lives of Passau's worthies,
past and present, to expose
their small-town hypocrisy
and their small- time Nazi
activities during World War
II.
She first attracted the
animosity of the people of
Passau at the age of 19 when
her essay, "My Hometown in
the Third Reich," was
chosen as the German entry
for a European essay com-
petition.
"For six weeks," she told
me, "I asked local people to
give me information about
the Nazi era. The response
was amazing: 'I'm too old to
remember,' I'm too young to

The Pariah
Of Passau

Anna Rosmus could not let the truth about
her home town in Germany and its Jews
go untold. Her story is the subject
of a film called The Nasty Girl.

know anything,' I wasn't
here at the time.' "
She soon realized that
something was wrong and
her father, a Passau head-
master, advised her to read
the local newspapers of the
period: "Slowly," she said,
"the names of people who
were still prominent in the
town began to strike a
chord."

Anna discovered that the
editor of the local Catholic
magazine, who had always
claimed to be a member of
the anti-Nazi resistance, had
in fact been a Nazi col-
laborator; that a busi-
nessman who claimed to be a
prisoner-of-war had been an
SS officer; that the current
mayor of Passau, Josef Eber,
then a member of the Hitler

Youth, was instrumental in
having a local woman sent to
Auschwitz after he reported
her to the Gestapo for anti-
Na zi activities.
Anna's obsession with
Passau's ugly past was
touched off while doing
research for that school
essay, but it was just the
first step down a long road of
relentless investigation and

revelation of the crimes and
misdemeanors of this small
town in Germany.
Nor was she distracted by
the harassment that accom-
panied her mission. She was,
she says, constantly followed
by three unknown men, and
when she sought help from
the police she was told they
could do nothing unless she
was actually attacked.
Even then, their assis-
tance was less than
wholehearted: One day, as
she was eating in a local
pizzeria, a man dressed in a
Nazi uniform walked in and
punched her to the ground.
"I called the police station
next door and they took 90
minutes to arrive, by which
time all witnesses had left."
Five years ago, she took
Passau's archivist to court in
Munich to demand the
release of the town's war-
time documents. She won
the battle but lost the war:
when she returned home she
was told that the documents
had been "lost in transit"
between Munich and
Passau. They are still miss-
ing.
"The atmosphere in the
town was explosive because
of the massive national
media coverage the case at-
tracted. The whole city
regarded me as the devil,
their enemy. Never a night
went by when I did not
receive at least a half-dozen
abusive phone calls
threatening to kill me, to
kidnap my daughters. I
received hate mail, people in
the street called me a
`Jewish whore.' "
She was expelled from the
University of Passau where
she was a third-year student
of sociology and German lit-
erature because, she was
told, "you can no longer
study because you have two
children." It has taken five
years of petitioning the
government to overturn that
ruling (which applied to no
other student) and win her
the right to return to her
studies.
Anna Rosmus has few
tangible gains to show for
her years of hard labor: She
has failed to stop the annual
reunion in Passau of the
Deutsche Volks Union,
whose members consist of
wartime Nazis; nor does she

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

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