By Britta Guerke Jun 30, 2009, 2:52 GMT
Berlin - Meta Schwarz only needed one thing to recover: the right medication after she was admitted to a hospital at Fuerth in Germany with kidney pain. But Nazi doctors would not treat her.
The 51-year-old German woman died in hospital on April 11, 1940.
'They denied her medication because she was Jewish,' said Gisela Naomi Blume, who has spent years studying how individuals perished in
the Holocaust persecution and recording victims' life stories.
To date, Schwarz's name had never appeared on any official list of Holocaust victims. Her death went unnoticed.
Thanks to work by researchers like Blume, who work at the micro level, dozens of new Holocaust victims in Germany are being discovered every year and added to the official roll.
Germany's Federal Archives began that roll in the 1960s and it was published as a memorial book in 1986. Two years ago, the roll of German Jews killed by the Nazis, which now totals 158,000 names, was placed online.
Based on European population data, 5 million to 6 million Jews are estimated to have perished in the Holocaust, the majority in eastern Europe.
'Even now, we receive completely new entries practically every day,' said Nicolai Zimmermann, who works in the Archives department that keeps the roll.
Many of the new names are cases like Schwarz, where a death does not appear at first glance to be the result of persecution.
'It may be impossible to tally all the Jewish victims of the Nazis who died in hospital,' he said.
Even for those who died in concentration and extermination camps, the records are incomplete.
In some cases, the victims' names were never written down, or the SS destroyed the records before the camps were liberated. Camp memorials are trying to reconstruct the lists from other evidence.
Often the publicly funded researchers obtain their data from amateur micro-historians like Blume, who focus on local history, said Zimmermann. Or relatives or kind municipal archives workers send in documentary evidence.
'We largely depend on their efforts,' said Zimmermann, adding that his department checks each new entry carefully. Over the past three years, 10,000 new names have been added to the memorial database of those killed.
In Fuerth, Blume has spent years researching what happened to the city's Jews. With supporters, she erected a monument to the Holocaust victims in the city's New Jewish Cemetery.
Relatives of victims continue to contact her and ask her to register new cases.
That is how she discovered the death of Meta Schwarz.
False Nazi-era records have to be unravelled. Some people were murdered in hospitals and prisons, but to avoid disputes, relatives were told they committed suicide.
Conversely, Blume has discovered suicides of Jews which were recorded as natural deaths.
Alfred Wagner, proprietor of a mens-wear shop in Nuremberg, attempted to poison himself in March 1942 after he was given notice that he would be 'deported,' the Nazis' cynical term for taking peope to the death camps.
'He died in hospital. The death certificate states cardiac asthma as cause,' said Blume. Relations told her what had really happened. The official roll includes those who died by Holocaust-induced suicide.
The Archives' Zimmermann said it would take many more years before the memorial roll stops increasing.
Meir Schwarz, 83, agrees that the search must go on. He last saw his mother Meta in Fuerth. He was among thousands of Jewish children who were evacuated from Germany by charities. He later settled in Israel.
'She and I both knew at the time we would never see one another again,' he recalls.
http://www.bundesarchiv.de/gedenkbuch/
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