To that end, he spent countless hours in archives over three decades searching out birth, marriage, and death records, tax ledgers, land registers, cattle trade protocols, and lists of citizens from the 19th century.
His massive effort has culminated in numerous articles and six substantial books about the Jews of Oberhessen, written individually or collaboratively with other researchers. His interest in German Jewish history began in his teen years when he uncovered a family secret: his own grandfather had committed suicide in After the Nazis came to power, his grandfather had continued a long-standing friendship with the Julius Katz family despite official decrees forbidding social connections between Aryans and Jews.
He did not want them to be written out of history, and he wanted townspeople to be accountable. Immediately after the war, few people talked about this. In his spare time he became a self-taught historian, focusing his energy on researching local Jewish history. He sought out elderly people who had known the Jews personally and could provide him with the names of families and stories about them.
When he obtained old school photographs, he tracked down former students to identify the Jewish children in them. Now he had faces to go with the names. He searched the local archives, seeking all references to Jews.
Although some ministers in the church were sympathetic towards the Jews, the chronicle mostly revealed raw hatred for them. Tax records gave him a sense of their economic status. In there were 93 Jews out of a total population of Some of the Jews were poor and lived in the countryside; others were better off and owned property in town. By the end of the s, Jews started leaving the area for better opportunities elsewhere.
