All informations about the persons for which are Stolpersteins layed are carefully investigated. Our main sources of information are:
Reports of living eye witness
Yes, they do exist: residents of Bad Soden who still live and who remember those days. But they get less and less: interviews in time are important and necessary.
Local history of Bad Soden
The first place to go is the archive of the town with its allways helpful team.
But also the history societies in Altenhain, Neuenhain and Bad Soden center may help.
City archive Frankfurt
Many documents like corpse identification cards or notifications about Jewish people from Bad Soden who fled to Frankfurt in the context of prosecution and deportation, can be found in the institute of city history.
University library Frankfurt
Also the Universita and city library in Frankfurt has a department with local information about Frankfurt. Here, they have adress and telephone books which contain also data of small locations in the environment of Frankfurt, e.g. Bad Soden.
Fritz-Bauer-Institute, Frankfurt
The Institute has not only a collection of the activities of the famous prosecutor Fritz Bauer, who was the first in the after war period to persecute Nazi crimes, but also manage data bases about many persued Jewish citizens of Hessen.
Jewish Museum, Frankfurt
The Jewish Museum has several departments with historical collections and documents about the Jewish life and history inb Frankfurt and environment.
Web sites with the history of Jewish citizens in Hessen
Before the holocaust – photos with the Jewish everyday life
Hessian State Archives
All important documents like taxation files, police reports, civil status files etc. are stored in diffrent archives in Hessen. The central search is possible by the investigation program Arcinsys. After an online rigistration and a search request you might put all results on a list and inspect them in the appropriate archive in the reading hall. You can also demand a photocopy (scan) of them. The marked files are then sendt to you and billed.
Please note: There are files and lists in the central archive which can be inspected only by the internal employees. For example, some of the reparation files and the lists of the Allies about the confiscation of Jewish real estates by the Nazi. All this material you might have a look upon, but you have to demand on place.
A good source is also the Landesgeschichtliche Informationssystem Hessen. Here, first you have to select the kind of sources you are looking for. Then, you have to do a search for the town. The listed sources can be select directly, enabling a direct download of all scanned pages of the birth, marriage and death registers.
Land registry office
The is the possibility to find out to whom a real estate belonged originally. By knowing this name you can demand eventual reparation files in the hessian state archives to get more information about the fate of people expropriated at that time. For the proper file insight, you need the parcel number (Flurstücknummer), because only the parcel is registrated, not the house on it. By the knowledge of the actual parcel number you might search backwards in time through the pages of the land registry books, evaluate divisions and fusions of parcels and finally get the list index within the book of the interesting parcel at that time. In the additional sections of the book („Abteilungen“) you will find all intersting information like depts, dept retirements, expropriations. FOr the inspection, you have to certify a „legitimate interest“ („Berechtigtes Interesse“) which normally given for members of the Stolperstein AG.
For Bad Soden, the land registry office is in the Amtsgericht Königstein, Gerichtstr.2.
Federal archive
After an israelic data base, in 1977 there was also created a federal republic data base for the persecuted by the Nazu regime. For this, there several documents exist:
- Dokumentation of the persecution of the Jews
- The list dof the Jewish inhabitants in the Third Reich 1933 – 1945
- The book of commemoration of the federal archive about the persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi.
Emigrant museum, Bremerhaven
In the German Emigrant House in Bremerhaven you might search in different data bases. Here, the name lists of several emigration ships are available and by this, family history is searchable.
Israeli data base of the shoa („holocaust“)
The cetral library and documentation facility of the shoa, the Yad Vashem, make a wide search possible about Jews from all the world. Also, the fate of the persecuted and murded Jews from Bad Soden is documentated here.
The Arolsen Archieves
The Arolsen Archives are an international center on Nazi persecution with the world’s most comprehensive archive on the victims and survivors of National Socialism. The collection has information on about 17.5 million people and belongs to UNESCO’s Memory of the World. It contains documents on the various victim groups targeted by the Nazi regime and is an important source of knowledge for society today.