WHY WERE THE CZECH TORAH SCROLLS NOT DESTROYED ?

Researched and written by Alan Cohen

​It is estimated that the Nazis destroyed a minimum of 30,000 Torah scrolls in the lands they occupied during World War II.   Only a few more than 1,900 survived the war.  Of these, most were Czech scrolls. Chevrei Tzedek is proud to care for one of these scrolls. ​

The story of the Czech Scrolls begins in 1941. Konstantin von Neurath was appointed as the Nazi governor of Bohemia-Moravia,  the present day Czech Republic.  Under pressure, he agreed to enforce the Nazi Nuremberg laws and he kept the synagogues open until he came under increased pressure in February and March of 1941 and ordered the synagogues closed.   At this time a delegation of Prague Jews visited him and asked if they could collect and preserve the Torah scrolls and other artifacts of the synagogues that were being closed, and von Neurath agreed.   In September of 1941  von Neurath was fired when he refused to deport the Jews to concentration camps and Polish ghettos.  For more information on von Neurath see below.

Von Neurath's replacement was the fanatical Nazi Reinhard Heydrich. He allowed Hans Gunther and his “Central Office for the Settlement of the Jewish Question”,  to round up and deport the Jews of Prague. Gunther also ordered the rapid completion of the project of emptying out synagogues of Torah scrolls and other Jewish artifacts and transporting them to Prague’s Jewish Museum and other warehouses.  Gunther allowed the Jews who were cataloguing the scrolls and other artifacts to continue their work. When they finished, they too were deported to Terezenstadt and eventually to Auschwitz and other death camps. Only two survived the Shoah.   For more information on Hans Gunther and speculation on possible reasons that these items were not destroyed see below.

Soon after the war, Czechoslovakia came under Communist control. The Communist government, like the Nazi government before it, did not permit Jewish religious life. The Torah scrolls were transferred to a damp warehouse in a former synagogue outside of Prague. Here they remained for almost two decades. 

In 1964, a small group of British Jews – an art dealer and a philanthropist, in consultation with a rabbi and a scholar – arranged the purchase of 1,564 scrolls from the Communist government and transported them to London. The Memorial Scrolls Trust was created to care for these scrolls and distribute them to congregations around the world.  

​Over the past 60 years, they have distributed most of the scrolls to worthy congregations.  Many congregations have been able to restore their scrolls, and over 100,000 bar and bat mitzvahs have been celebrated using scrolls that Prague Jews rescued from the clutches of the Nazis.

For information on other scrolls that survived World War II see below.

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Konstantin Von Neurath

Konstantin Von Neurath was a professional diplomat who had entered the German foreign service before World War I, and during the Weimar Republic served as ambassador to Denmark, then Italy, and finally Great Britain. During his assignment in Britain he became friends with Britain's leaders, including Ramsey MacDonald , Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain.

In January 1933, Chancellor Franz von Papen convinced an increasingly demented President Hindenburg to make Hitler Chancellor. 
Von Papen had convinced himself he could control Hitler by appointing himself Deputy Chancellor and by handpicking 8 of the 12 cabinet ministers, none of whom would be Nazis.  To this end, von Papen asked von Neurath to serve as foreign minister and von Neurath agreed and returned from his post in London.  (Von Papen's plan to make Hitler his puppet didn't work.)
 
During the next five years von Neurath served as Nazi Germany's foreign minister and, not being a Nazi party member, gave Hitler respectability, particularly with his buddy Neville Chamberlain.  In February of 1938 Hitler told von Neurath he would be invading and taking over  Czechoslovakia by October 1st at the latest.  Von Neurath strongly objected and dared to argue with Hitler to his face. Hitler fired him on the spot.  
 
In late September of 1938 came the infamous Munich conference, where Neville Chamberlain ceded the Czech border lands to Nazi
Germany, but which delayed Hitler's invasion plans.  On March 15, 1939, Hitler occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia.  Neville Chamberlain was on a train to his home parliamentary district in Birmingham where he had planned to give a speech on the British version of Social Security.  But while on the train he tore up his speech and wrote a new one, denouncing the occupation of Czechoslovakia in the strongest of terms and vowing that Britain would go to war if Hitler tried to take one more square inch of one more country.  The speech surprised Hitler, this was not the Neville Chamberlain he had met at Munich. So, after splitting off Slovakia from Czechoslovakia, Hitler attempted to appease Chamberlain by naming Chamberlain's buddy Konstantin von Neurath as the Nazi governor of Bohemia-Moravia,  the present day Czech Republic. 
 
Konstantin von Neurath was not a Nazi and denied at his Nuremberg trial that he harbored any prejudice against Jews.  Under pressure, he
agreed to enforce the Nazi Nuremberg laws but otherwise did not persecute the Jews and worked to restrain the Gestapo.  Importantly, he
kept the synagogues open until he succumbed to more pressure from Hitler in February and March of 1941 when he ordered the synagogues closed.   At this time a delegation of Prague Jews visited him and asked if they could collect and preserve the Torah scrolls and other artifacts of the synagogues that were being closed, and von Neurath agreed.   In September of 1941 Hitler demanded that von Neurath deport the Jews to concentration camps and Polish ghettos and he refused, so Hitler fired him (again).  

Von Neurath's replacement in September, 1941 was the fanatical Nazi Reinhard Heydrich, the chairman of the Wannsee Conference which resulted in "the final solution to the Jewish problem".   In contrast to von Neurath, Heyrdrich was an anti-Semite who was responsible for deporting the Jews of Prague to Theresienstadt and to Polish ghettos.  Most of those who survived the crowded conditions and deliberate starvation would be deported to their deaths at Auschwitz.  "Hangman Heyrdrich" was assassinated by the Czech underground on June 4, 1942. 
 
In 1946 Von Neurath was one of the 22 defendants at the Nuremberg trial and was charged with crimes against humanity.  The Nuremberg
judges (Soviet judge excepted) acquitted von Neurath of those charges in regards to Czech Jews, but found him guilty of ordering the Nazi army to fire on anti-Nazi student protesters protesting the Nazi invasion of Poland of October 1, 1939.  Nine students were killed and 2,000 were sent to concentration camps.  Von Neurath was imprisoned 1946 to 1954 and he died in 1956.

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Hans Gunther

The second German involved in not destroying the Torahs - but who oversaw the murder of over 70,000 Czech Jews - was SS Officer Hans
Gunther.  In July of 1939, four months after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Gunther was appointed head of the “Central Office for Jewish Emigration”.  While governor of Bohemia-Moravia, Von Neurath tried to keep Gunther and his Gestapo in check. With Von Neurath’s firing in September 1941, Gunther’s SS section was renamed the “Central Office for the Settlement of the Jewish Question”, and Gunther’s SS officers began to round up and deport the Jews of Prague. One of Gunther’s first acts after "Hangman Heydrich" assumed the governorship was to order the rapid completion of the project of emptying out synagogues of Torah scrolls and other Jewish artifacts and transporting them to Prague’s Jewish Museum, which had been founded in 1906. The museum could not contain all the artifacts, so Gunther acquired 40 warehouses, all of which would eventually be filled with the over 212,000 artifacts. In addition to 1800 Torah scrolls, these articles included siddurim, chumashim and other books, megillot, Torah crowns and rimonim, yads, and other ritual objects.

Gunther allowed the Jews who were cataloguing the scrolls and other artifacts to continue their work. When they finished, they too were deported to Terezenstadt and eventually to Auschwitz and other death camps. Only two survived the Shoah.  These two survivors reported that they and their colleagues participated in this project of cataloguing the scrolls and other objects removed from synagogues, because they could not imagine that the Nazis were intent on genocide. They envisioned returning to Prague and returning the scrolls and books and other artifacts to the synagogues from which they had been taken. 

Gunther is also infamous for directing a propaganda film depicting Terezenstadt as an ideal vacation spot. Jewish survivors called him the
“Smiling Executioner.” Gunther was assassinated by the Czech underground on May 5, 1945, just as Germany was about to surrender.

​Why didn’t Gunther have the Gestapo Destroy the Scrolls?

During his 2 ½ years as governor, Konstantin von Neurath prevented the Nazis from destroying Torahs and other Jewish ritual objects. Once von Neurath was gone, it is unclear why Gunther did not destroy the Torahs. Gunther considered himself a pseudo-academic and kept a personal library filled with books. He may have felt the Torah scrolls and other artifacts should be kept for future study and research once all the Jews in the world had been murdered. My own theory – not inconsistent – is that by September of 1941, when von Neurath had been fired and Heydrich and Gunther began the deportations, the Nazis had completed their destruction of Torahs in all the other countries in Europe they occupied and had moved on to mass murder. Gunther may have simply concentrated on deporting and murdering Jews and bypassed the preliminary step of destroying Torahs.

Many believe that Gunther, as a pseudo academic, was planning to establish a museum to the extinct Jewish race and had saved the Torahs
for the museum. However, there is no record of any plans for such a museum, and the Nazis were excellent record keepers. Also, with the
Jewish Museum and 40 warehouses overflowing with over 212,000 Torah scrolls, megillahs, Torah crowns, yads, and other articles, he could have ordered the destruction of most of these and still would have plenty remaining for a museum.

Other Scrolls That Survived the Shoah

In 2016 the Russians opened a vault outside of Moscow and discovered over 100 scrolls that the Red Army had seized when they drove
the Nazis out of Hungary in early 1945.  How did these scrolls survive?  Hungary, under the dictatorship of the fascist Admiral Horthy, was allied with Nazi Germany, so the Nazis did not invade Hungary until March 19, 1944, by which time the German army was in full retreat from the advancing Red Army of the Soviet Union, which was nearing the Hungarian-Soviet border.  The Nazis had to act fast to murder Hungary's Jews. Although they managed to destroy most of Hungary’s Torahs, they apparently overlooked these 100 plus scrolls, which were seized by the advancing Red Army and taken to a vault near Moscow where they were forgotten until 2016. Thanks to an agreement brokered by the U.S. State Department, the Russian government returned the scrolls to Hungary, where they have been placed in synagogues and museums.
 
Otherwise, the only Torahs that survived the Shoah, other than the 1,800 Czech scrolls, were the handful that German Jews had managed to remove from their synagogues on Kristallnacht before the mobs came to destroy the synagogues and Torahs. German Jews then managed to take a handful out of continental Europe before World War II began on October 1, 1939.

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