Lechner: Die NS-Zeit in der Region Ulm/Neu-Ulm

Silvester Lechner (Ed.). Die NS-Zeit in der Region Ulm/Neu-Ulm. Stuttgart: Silberburg-Verlag, 1988.

Dr. Silvester Lechner is Director of the DZOK (Dokumentationszentrum Oberer Kuhberg) in Ulm, a research facility dedicated to understanding the evolution of concentration camps in Germany and Eastern Europe. Oberer Kuhberg. Ulm, was site of one of the very first concentration camps in Germany.

Lechner edited this book entitled Die NS-Zeit in der Region Ulm/Neu-Ulm [The Nazi Era in the Ulm/New Ulm Region]. In addition to a chapter dedicated to the seven friends from Ulm who were associated with White Rose resistance, Lechner and his staff compiled exhaustive information about the NSDAP in Ulm. From an organizational chart for Hitler Youth, to pictures of uniforms for all branches of Hitler Youth, to a who’s who of Ulmer Nazis, to miscellaneous newspaper articles about issues relevant to anyone studying that era – it is amazing what all Lechner was able to cram into this compact book.

As I have worked through other secondary resources about the White Rose during the last almost-thirty years, I have often wished that those writers had met Silvester Lechner before they started their usually-bad histories or biographies. Lechner is a quiet, gentle man whose personal politics are likely pretty far left of center. In our conversations and correspondence, his political viewpoints did not color his objectivity.

This reference book serves as a map through the complex, tangled world of Ulm during the Third Reich. Writers who either ignored it or failed to acquire it have made elementary mistakes in their research. I do not know how many times I referred to it while writing Volumes I and II of our White Rose Histories, © 2002. Like Roget's Thesaurus or the Shell Reiseatlas, this is a source that belongs next to the keyboard or on an open Google Chrome tab.

I only wish that an expanded version could be published. (A current back-burnered project for Center for White Rose Studies is to collaborate directly with Lechner on precisely this project. Stay tuned.) Since 1988, much new information has been uncovered that would make this an even better resource for every writer involved in a White Rose research project.

© 2023 Denise Heap. Please contact Exclamation! Publishers for permission to quote.