Manfred Kissinger

Manfred Kissinger was born in Munich on March 27, 1932. He was the second son of Jenny and Julius Kissinger. Manfred’s brother Albert was a year older than him. The family lived on the first floor of Bürkleinstraße 16 (today 20) in Munich-Lehel. Because the apartment was becoming too small, the family moved into the apartment to the left of the stairs on the same floor. Uncle Ferdinand Kissinger, who was divorced, and later grandfather Simon Kissinger lived there as well. Manfred and Albert were proper Lehel lads. They went to the Jewish elementary school just a few minutes away on foot. Their father and uncle taught there. But the boys probably did not enjoy a sheltered childhood in the district. Contemporary witnesses relate how the Jewish children in Lehel were excluded and sometimes treated brutally by the Christian children. The Jewish lawyer Fritz Silber later recalled how his son was run into, hit and sworn at in Bürkleinstraße by another child on a scooter. From 1940, the Kissinger family made great efforts to be able to emigrate to the USA – but in vain. Manfred Kissinger was nine years old when the Gestapo (Secret Police) took him away from the apartment with his family and brought them to the “Judensiedlung” (“Jewish Quarter”) Milbertshofen at Knorrstraße 148. He was deported to Kaunus in Lithuania along with around 1,000 other Jewish children, women and men. This was the first and biggest deportation of Munich Jews. On November 25, 1941 SS mobile killing squads shot Manfred along with his whole family and had them all buried in an anonymous mass grave.(text Felicia Englmann, editor C. Fritsche, translation C. Hales)