Out of Passau: Leaving a City Hitler Called Home

The provocative memoir by a courageous German scholar forced to flee her hometown after uncovering its complicity in Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Nestled along the Danube in southern Germany, Passau is a pleasant tourist destination known for its historic buildings and scenic views at the intersection of three rivers. But for decades, the small Bavarian city had been suppressing an intimate association with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
 
Born in Passau in 1960, Anna Rosmus discovered those dark secrets as a teenager. In 1994, just before the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the World War II, she set out to commemorate the forgotten Holocaust victims who had died there, expecting little if any controversy. What she encountered instead was an obstructionist city council, a virulently resentful local population, and an unsettling degree of latent anti-Semitism. Eventually the death threats led to her own emigration from Germany to the United States.
 
Rosmus has been hailed by Marc Fisher of the Washington Post as “an intellectual firebrand, a rigorous researcher burning with a passion to tell the story that must be told.” In Out of Passau, she explores not only the disturbing history of her hometown, but also the life-changing fallout that resulted from her determination to recognize those who had lost their lives.