The Lost Main Synagogue of Herzog-Max-Straße
Why is it significant?
At the corner of Herzog-Max-Straße and Maxburgstraße, find a low, dark block of stone with a Hebrew and German inscription. Around it is ordinary city: traffic, offices, people hurrying to the shops. It is very easy to walk past... and for decades, that is exactly what Munich did.
Key Facts
| Place | The Lost Main Synagogue of Herzog-Max-Straße |
|---|---|
| Address | Herzog-Max-Straße, 80333 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.14010, 11.56840 |
| Part of Walk | Munich 1918-1945: The Nazi Era, Its Victims and the White Rose |
| Generated | Generated |
At the corner of Herzog-Max-Straße and Maxburgstraße, find a low, dark block of stone with a Hebrew and German inscription. Around it is ordinary city: traffic, offices, people hurrying to the shops. It is very easy to walk past... and for decades, that is exactly what Munich did.
On this site stood the main synagogue of Munich, consecrated in 1887 and designed by the architect Albert Schmidt. It was a large, confident building in the Romanesque revival style, standing only a few streets from the Frauenkirche. For Munich's Jewish citizens, many of them doctors, merchants, lawyers and artists, it was a statement in stone: we belong to this city.
In June 1938, Hitler visited the art building just around the corner and saw the synagogue. He ordered it gone. The Jewish community was told on the 8th of June, and demolition began the very next day. This was five months before the November pogrom, at a time when the rest of the world still imagined it was dealing with an ordinary government. The site was turned into a car park.
Then came the 9th of November 1938. The Nazi leadership gathered in Munich every year on that date to commemorate the failed putsch of 1923, and that evening Joseph Goebbels gave a speech in the Old Town Hall that unleashed the pogrom across Germany. In Munich that night, the Ohel Jakob synagogue burned, Jewish shops were smashed, and Jewish men were arrested and sent to the camp at Dachau.
The memorial stone was set up in 1969. It is small, and for a long time it was almost the only sign in the centre of Munich that a Jewish community had ever existed here. Stand with it for a moment. Then head west to Arcisstraße and walk north up it to Königsplatz, to the place where the party that gave these orders had its headquarters.