Ferdinand Kissinger

“Fatty Kissinger“ is what the schoolchildren called their teacher Ferdinand Kissinger, to differentiate him from his brother Julius, “skinny Kissinger“. Ferdinand Kissinger grew up with six siblings in Urspringen in Franconia. His father, Simon Kissinger, was a teacher and leader of prayer in the Jewish community. After passing his state examination at the Israelitische Lehrerbildungsanstalt (Jewish Teacher Training Institute) in Würzburg, Ferdinand Kissinger took his first job as a teacher and leader of prayer in the Jewish community of Willmars in around 1910. In the First World War he fought in France and won the Iron Cross 2nd Class. In 1924, he moved with his wife Sophie – the couple had married in 1920 – to Munich. There, Ferdinand Kissinger was a teacher at the Jewish elementary school. When Sophie Kissinger became mentally ill and went to stay with her mother in Darmstadt, Ferdinand Kissinger went to live from 1933 with the family of his brother Julius at Bürkleinstraße 16 (today 20). In the course of the “Kristallnacht” pogroms, Ferdinand Kissinger was interned in Dachau concentration camp on November 10, 1938 and severely mistreated. On December 12, 1938 he was released from detention and returned to his school. Unlike three of his siblings, Ferdinand Kissinger initially wanted to stay in Germany. It was not until 1940 that he began making efforts to emigrate to the USA – but in vain. On November 20, 1941 the Gestapo (Secret Police) took him with his brother’s family away from their apartment and brought them to the “Judensiedlung” (“Jewish Quarter”) Milbertshofen at Knorrstraße 148. Together with around 1,000 other Jewish children, women and men, he was supposed to be “relocated”, as it was officially called, to the Riga ghetto in Latvia. This was the first and biggest deportation of Jews from Munich. Because the Riga ghetto was already overcrowded, the deportation train was diverted to Kaunas in Lithuania. There, SS mobile killing squads shot Ferdinand Kissinger on November 25, 1941 along with his family members and had them all buried in a mass grave. (text Felicia Englmann, editor C. Fritsche, translation C. Hales)