Out of Passau

Born in 1960 to a middle-class Roman Catholic family, Rosmus had lived in Passau, Germany, her entire life, yet she was unaware that the father of Heinrich Himmler had once been a professor at the college-preparatory high school she attended or that Adolf Hitler and other prominent Nazi Party members had grown up just across the Danube River in Austria. Since Rosmus had no knowledge of these and other Nazi affiliations and activities in her hometown, she embarked on her essay project confident that the Passau citizenry would be proud of her findings. Rosmus had no inkling she had just begun what would become a lifelong effort to uncover Passau's buried complicity in the crimes of the Nazi state - an effort that would bring overwhelming gratitude from the international Jewish community but contempt and ostracism from the people whom she had known all her life.