Book review: Bad Tölz: Rare Fotos, vergessene Geschichte(n) 1920-1950
On these pages, we better comprehend that the “safe haven” our White Rose friends sought out was far less safe and far less of a haven than originally believed. And the puzzles and riddles deepen.
Christoph Schnitzer, Martin Hake, and Sebastian Lindmeyr (Stadtarchiv Bad Tölz). Bad Tölz: Rare Fotos, vergessene Geschichte(n) 1920-1950. Bad Tölz: cs-press&print Bad Tölz, 2021.
In June 1973, at the tender age of 18, I traveled to Germany for the first time. My destination: Bad Heilbrunn, a small town in Landkreis Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen, the county of Bad Tölz and Wolfratshausen. I quickly learned that if you needed to purchase anything substantial, you had to hitch a ride to Tölz.
Marktstraβe — Market Street — in Tölz is legendary. It is built on a mildly steep incline, starting at the Isar and ending at an old city gate. No matter where you are in Tölz, Kalvarienberg reigns supreme. Leonhardi chapel and the Kreuzkirche mark the end of the stations of the cross. The path up Kalvarienberg past those “stations” is quite steep.
As I returned again and again over the next few pre-White Rose decades, I explored the region. Lenggries, Kochel, Kesselberg, Walchensee, Wieskirche, Tegernsee, Starnberg, Zugspitze, Eibsee, Plansee, Füssen. Before long, I knew many of these destinations better than I knew destinations in my home state of Texas. Perhaps because most require a great deal of walking.
Therefore when I first read about the White Rose students, I “knew” the places that made them who they were. I understood how they were drawn away from Munich, away from Ulm, to these landscapes that were anything but Brown. As their minds feasted on Claudel, Thomas Mann, Augustine, Johannes Maassen, Dostoevsky, their souls were nourished by the Upper Bavarian countryside. Including Bad Tölz.
As I wrote my histories, I tried to infuse their stories with visions of that countryside. Their work did not take place in a vacuum. If you don’t understand the places they inhabited, it’s next to impossible to grasp the context of those leaflets.
In October 2023, I stopped by the visitors’ center on Marktstraβe in Tölz. I had tried since 1995 to find the home in Tölz where Hans Scholl visited friends. The “places” behind the stories about Ute Borchers and the Harterts — I wrote Found Places about our almost-30-year search for the Harterts’ house, the one Jürgen Wittenstein insisted was at the top of Kalvarienberg. Kalvarienberg 1.
My expectations were low as I asked if anyone in the visitors’ center knew about the Harterts’ home on Kalvarienberg. I had asked that question in that place in years past. Honestly didn’t expect a different answer this time.
Instead, Birgit Groβ pointed me to this book by Christoph Schnitzer and Martin Hake. “I think they found it.”
I thumbed through the book for a few minutes and yes! There it was! Information about the location of the Harterts’ home, as well as a note that the Borchers’ home had been demolished.
When I returned to my hotel in Heilbrunn, I devoured all six pages devoted to White Rose in Bad Tölz. Birgit had given me contact information for Christoph Schnitzer, who in turn gave me Martin’s email address. Martin was the researcher who handled the White Rose section.
Our conversations since have both interested me and served as reassurance that not all German researchers have drunk the Scholl Kool-Aid. When work was started on this book, they intended only to mention Marie-Luise Schultze-Jahn, close friend of Hans Leipelt, who later would move to Bad Tölz. Martin was not and still is not a White Rose scholar. He focuses solely on the history of Tölz. After all, he grew up next to the Thomas Mann house.
Martin did several things that I wish I’d thought of. (When I say “not one person can know everything,” this is the sort of thing I mean!)
First, when he too ran into dead ends about the Harterts’ vacation home in Bad Tölz, he traced it via real estate records. That is, he looked for property owned by the Hartert and Borchers families. So dadgum smart! And he found it. Kalvarienberg 4, not 1. No renumbering as I had posited. It was “4” then, it is “4” now. Yes, in Hans Scholl’s Gestapo interrogation, he gave the address as “1” — but no one should use that as gospel.
His search for “Haus Rosswies” owned by the Borchers led him to photographs of the home in a rural suburb (Roβwies) of Tölz. In other words, Haus Rosswies was the house in Roβwies, not a house named Rosswies.
Next, Martin searched out living members of the Borchers family. He interviewed them regarding their memories of Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, and Alexander Schmorell. When they provided letters from Ute’s mother that portray Hans Scholl in a less than flattering light, Martin did not hesitate to include those. Frau Borchers was less than thrilled at the attention 22-year-old Hans Scholl paid her 14-year-old daughter. She told him to stay away from Ute.
Finally, Martin asked Marie-Luise Schultze-Jahn if she were aware that Hans Scholl had frequently visited her adopted hometown. She was surprised — she had not known that fact.
My only gripe with the White Rose section is their failure to attribute their learning of Hans Scholl’s visits in Tölz to my work. Martin told me he was Googling for information about Marie-Luise Schultze-Jahn in Tölz and stumbled across my histories. Despite having grown up in Bad Tölz, he had never known of this direct connection to the town.
Yet on page 142, the text states, Es ist dem Tölzer Ortshistoriker Martin Hake zu verdanken, dass diese Besuche des Mitbegründers der “Weiβen Rose” im Isarwinkel der Vergessenheit entrissen wurden. [It is thanks to local historian Martin Hake from Tölz that these visits by the co-founder of the “White Rose” to the Isarwinkel were rescued from oblivion.] I sincerely hope that when the Stadtarchiv and cs-press&print Bad Tölz reprint this book, they will correct that and footnote my White Rose histories.
This book is important for anyone researching White Rose. Actually, it’s important for anyone who seeks to better understand day-to-day life in Bavaria during the Third Reich.
All too often, I read biographies or “histories” — not just about White Rose resistance, but about life under Nazism in general — and there is no sense whatever of what it meant to get up, eat breakfast, go to work-school-church, eat lunch, take a break, keep working-studying-praying, eat supper, spend the evening with friends, read the paper or listen to the radio, go to sleep. Our vision of life in Germany from 1933-1945 tends to focus on Nazi flags, goose-stepping, Heil Hitler, Hitler Youth, propaganda, military, wars. Of course everyday life included Nazi flag, goose-stepping, and the rest.
But it was much more. It was Hitler speaking in the run-down Schaftlerbräu in 1922, to horrid review. It was that brewery being remodeled with tons of new business in 1935, evidence of Hitler’s economic miracle. It’s photos of school children and choirboys. It’s early attempts to turn Blomberg into a ski destination. It’s fights and yelling about train stations and dams. It’s makers of skis and boats trying to gain a foothold in a saturated market.
It’s Karl Valentin, Thomas and Katja Mann, the Benz family, Heinrich Mann, Ludwig Thoma, making appearances in Tölzer cafes and restaurants, some because they had vacation homes there, some because it was a good place to be seen. It’s floods. It’s plane crashes and new butter factories.
It was the glory of continuing Leonhardifahrt, and the not-so-glorious decision to ban Jewish guests from Tölz’s numerous hotels and spas(*). It was surviving hyperinflation, the Great Depression, and then welcoming financial prosperity as Hitler primed the pump. It was views of the Graf Zeppelin as it headed towards Rio de Janeiro. It was cheering as the NSDAP gave Tölz a new bridge (not mentioning of course that they simply implemented plans already in the works). It was watching Hitler’s portrait replacing crucifixes. It was Hans Kirchmair declaring that the Party “interferes too much.”
It was celebrating Fasching (but not Oktoberfest). It was Michael Reisacher, publisher of the Tölzer Zeitung, refusing to officially align, while the Tölzer Kurier obeyed in advance. It was the TZ developing its niche market as journal for the “Behörden” (local authorities). And it was Michael Reisacher watching as the NSDAP forced both papers to align and merge in 1937, pushing Reisacher out of a job. He suicided shortly thereafter.
Those of us involved in Holocaust education, no matter our primary focus, would do well to seek out books like this one. When I have time to write the 2025/2026 updates to White Rose Histories Volumes I and II, I will include a great deal of information from this book and their subsequent one which digs deeper into Bad Tölz during the Nazi era. Not just from the “White Rose” sections, but in general.
Because — place matters. Place matters a great deal.
On these pages, we better comprehend that the “safe haven” our White Rose friends sought out was far less safe and far less of a haven than originally believed. And the puzzles and riddles deepen.
*Christoph Schnitzer and Martin Hake are working on a new book about the family of Julius Hellmann, Jewish owners of the Parkhotel in Bad Tölz.
At the time that Schnitzer penned his section of this book, he believed that Julius Hellmann suicided on the last day of World War II. He would learn that his assumption was wrong. Hellmann and his family were murdered by Nazis, Julius Hellmann in Chełmno, his brother Moritz in Sobibor. The surviving members of the Hellmann family fled to the United States, penniless.
Because when Julius Hellmann tried to sell the Parkhotel in 1934, no one would offer him an amount close to its value. He tried renting it out, but that did not bring in the same money that his almost-1000 guests did. He had thought the antisemitism of the late 1910s and early 1920s was bad. It crescendoed into outright hate and persecution in the 1930s.
Julius tried fleeing Bad Tölz, taking his family to Hamburg in 1938. They were deported to the Łódź Ghetto in 1941.
Providing this information as evidence of the quality of scholarship in the book I am reviewing here. I can hardly wait to read the Hellmann publication.
© 2025 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact us for permission to quote.
To order digital version of White Rose History, Volume II, click here. Digital version of White Rose History, Volume I is available here.
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