It is common knowledge that Bayreuth was Hitler’s stronghold and focal point of antisemitic sentiments during the Third Reich.
In the context of a scientific-historical research I have dealt intensively with this topic and found that National Socialism has a long tradition in the Ditmar-Runyai house in Bayreuth.
I can understand the present generation very well. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Nazi criminals have many questions and only rarely get answers. Just like me, they are part of a deceived generation that cannot honestly deal with parts of their lives.
I am a father of wonderful children myself and I do not want them to become victims of contempt for human dignity and antisemitism and to experience the same persecution that I experienced from my parents in Bayreuth.
My heart aches for all those who were murdered by my ancestors and whose existence was ruined and destroyed.
Ditmar, a War Criminal
My mother’s father, my Ditmar-grandpa, was SS-Obersturmfuehrer and Gauhauptstellenleiter of the NSDAP in the Bayreuth Gauleitung. He proudly wore his black uniform walking through the streets of the ‘brown’ city – meticulously endeavoring to ‘cleanse’ it from political opponents. In 1948 he was classified as a war criminal in the highest group of “main offenders” in the denazification trials. With more than a dozen ‘Persilscheine’¹ from his like-minded peers, he managed to abdicate his responsibility and get away as a “Mitläufer”². Throughout his life, he remained loyal to his oath “Loyalty and obedience to the Fuehrer even unto death”.
Transylvania’s Nazi Leadership Elite
My Ditmar-grandma, née Scheiner, is the offspring of a family that is completely contaminated by Lutheran German-nationalism. She grew up in Transylvania. It is appalling to discover the worst Nazi officials of Transylvania in her family tree. It was their custom to volunteer for the Waffen-SS, just like her brother-in-law, Walter May. As propaganda leader in Kronstadt, he was a member of the Nazi leadership in Transylvania and one of the closest confidants of Volksgruppenfuehrer Andreas Schmidt. Both ensured that the Deutsche Volksgruppe (German Ethnic Group) was transformed into an authoritarian Fuehrer movement. The focus of his Office for Press and Propaganda was to protect the “German nature” from all foreign influences. Parallel to Joseph Goebbels in Hitler Germany, his inflammatory propaganda was instrumental in recruiting young men for the German combat elite in Transylvania.
What would all this be worth unless a pastor of the Lutheran Church gave his blessing to it? Nazi Bishop Wilhelm Staedel, who had married into the family, proclaimed in Hermannstadt that the Transylvanian Saxons had to thank the German God for giving them Hitler – which most of them did with conviction. His antisemitic “Institute for the Study of Jewish Influence on German Church Life” worked intensively on censoring the Bible and eliminating most parts of the Old Testament.
“Don’t you watch that, he’s a Jew!”
Television shows with Jewish hosts were forbidden in my family under ‘German democracy’. “Don’t you watch that, he’s a Jew!” Ditmar Grandma aggressively yelled at me. Until her death in 2010, she was a subscriber to the “Nationalzeitung” and read the right-wing extremist hate sheet with pleasure. A letter from the NSDAP was her pride and joy:
“She shows interest in today’s Germany and follows the speeches of the Fuehrer and all the events inside and outside our fatherland with great love and respect.”
Gauleitung Schwaben – Office for Educators (NSLB) 1941
The Nazi traces outlasted – she was and remained an ardent supporter of Hitler until her death.
When my family gathered for celebrations, it was quite ‘normal’ that they regularly denigrated foreigners, different-minded people, or ‘gypsies’ and stirred up hatred against them. Remarks like “With Adolf this would not have happened…” were typical for these conversations.
The Gatherings of the Transylvanian Saxons
In order to pass on the cultural mindset (!) to me, I had to accompany my grandmother to various occasions of the Transylvanian Saxons in Bayreuth when I was a teenager. In their nostalgia she and her best friend K. Schüller, sacristan of the Evangelical Reformed Church in the Erlangerstrasse, sang many a forbidden song there. It was an open secret that Schüller’s purpose in life was to vilify and denounce her fellow countrymen in order to satisfy her pathological addiction to power, prestige, and money, both in Bayreuth and in Transylvania. Always present and part of this strange company: her son-in-law and sacristan of the Ordenskirche, a certain man named Gottschling, without profession, but who was an activist for the party and Securitate in communist Transylvania.
Today I ask myself: How can it be that tax money is used for the work of such dubious characters?
Defamation
After I claimed the right to live my life in freedom as a young man and left the Lutheran Church, the rural Upper Franconian antisemitism broke loose against me. With the decision to join Rhema Christian Center (CCR) and thus the Word of Faith movement, I experienced the full force of traditional Nazi ideology in my family: I was disinherited and erased from their family books.
To my horror, my parents took part in the defamation campaign against the CCR. These senseless, fascist actions gave their lives meaning.
Such bitterly religious, anti-truth concept as my parents established in collaboration with self-proclaimed ‘luminaries’ did not exist elsewhere. In union with Rubens Horst, the Lutheran pastor of the Ordenskirche, Dr. Heidi Schönfeld, a teacher of religion and ‘cult commissioner’, who is rumored to have mysteriously received her doctorate, the Holocaust denier Hedwig Holley, and cult chaser Bernhard Wolf, who is notorious in Bayreuth for his forever dubious Research Institute for New Religiosity at the local university, they created a clear enemy image that only exists in the ‘brown’ Bayreuth.
That list was compiled by […]. It was to be distributed only to a few confidential people.
By “mistake”, it fell into the hands of everyone.
Around Aug. 28, 2008, Hans Schwarz passed this VIP list of people […] to Liselotte Runyai. He knew that it was supposed to be given to me. That’s why he blackened the names of […]. But Liselotte also had the unblackened list in her hands.
Mrs. Runyai as well as Hans and Ingrid Schwarz urgently ask that this list will by no means get into the hands of Kath. Siegling or her lawyer.
They all want to help, but ask for absolute protection. So do I!
Hedwig Holley
Because of these connections, their practices, and their maniacal persecutions I have once and for all freed myself from the Runyai-Roots. For many years I have been living happily in Switzerland.
By courtesy of Andreas Runyai (runyai.com), Project Management Never Give Up
June, 2020
¹ Persilschein: a written statement issued to testify of someone’s ‘moral qualities’ and thus whitewash them from their Nazi crimes
² Mitläufer: this term was used in the ‘denazification trials’ to label someone a passive hanger-on as opposed to a perpetrator. Anyone declared “Mitläufer” faced no or minimal punishment and was permitted to resume their career