Luitpold Wallach: A Biography

Abstract

After 1933, unable to find or keep university positions in Germany because of the political situation, many German historians emigrated to the united states. luitpold Wallach was among the younger refugees who had their doctoral degrees but could not expect to hold academic positions under the nazi regime and its worsening anti-semitic agenda.1 Born in munich on Feb. 6, 1910, Wallach grew up in the schwabian village of laupheim (studying latin, Greek, and Hebrew from age six until he left to attend the Gymnasium in ulm on the danube). He was a student at the university of Berlin and at the Hochschule der Wissenschaft des Judentums during 1929–30 and then at the university of tübingen from 1931–33, receiving his d. Phil. in november 1932, with a dissertation titled Studien zur Chronik Bertholds von Zwiefalten, directed by Prof. dr. eric König.2 With no academic appointment open to him because he was Jewish, he undertook (1933–38) a two-fold pattern of research and publication that would define his career, i.e., dividing his time between medieval history and the history of Judaism. He also turned to the other profession for which he was trained and served as rabbi in ulm/laupheim (september 1933–march 1937) and then (1937–39) as the last Bezirksrabbiner (district rabbi) of Göppingen (Württemberg), until he was imprisoned there by the nazis and sent to dachau concentration camp (1938–39). strenuous efforts by friends and his sister sally, who was residing in new York, procured his release from dachau, and he left Germany and crossed into France with little more than three papers that he was ready to publish. after the war, he would learn that his father, whom he had last seen in dachau, had been killed at KZ auschwitz, his younger sister Betti had died at KZ stutthoff, but his mother had died in laupheim, despite the efforts of neighbors who took the risk of trying to help her, and was buried there.