National Socialism in Biberach

The Nazi dictatorship did not simply befall Biberach like a natural catastrophe. In 1932 and 1933, the NSDAP’s (= National Socialist German Workers’ Party) election results were higher than the national average. The Museum Biberach reveals how the town’s citizens became either victims or perpetrators. Many gravitated toward those in power, held offices, denounced fellow citizens, and tried to gain advantages. Opponents of the regime were surveilled, locked up, damaged professionally, or publicly pilloried. Jewish stores were boycotted until the families left town. Disabled, poor, and uneducated people as well as alcoholics were sterilized against their will and gassed in the former Samaritan hospital Grafeneck. Prisoners of war, English internees, and former concentration camp detainees were locked up in the »Lindele Camp«. There were many nameless dead.

In 1945 the war also arrived in Biberach with bombings and plundering. The impact of the Third Reich was devastating. How could this have happened? How did the Nazi state function? The exhibition deals with ideological blindness and crimes against humanity, with party opportunism, and officious avoidance, but also with moral courage and solidarity. The only remedy against oblivion is knowledge.

Photo: Upper Swabia Day in 1939 with 12,000 people on Biberach’s market square: seduction and violence – a blatant display of the Nazi regime’s principles. Municipal archives Biberach, recolored.