A Nazi street in today’s Germany

Posted by Thomas Klikauer

Ever since the liberation from Nazism in 1945, Germany has been eager to present itself as the new Germany – the Germany that has learned from its past. 

Yet, most Nazi traditions – and most Nazi apparatchiks (with only a few exceptions) – were willingly converted into that so-called new Germany.

Many even enjoyed brilliant careers in post-Nazi Germany – unlike their millions of victims, who were murdered or died because of deliberate genocide, massacres, mass bombings, disease, and starvation.

One of those successful Nazi converts was Richard Trunk – a musical composer and convinced Nazi from the very beginning of Hitler’s regime. Despite having been a Nazi – or perhaps because of it – his hometown still wants to keep streets and schools after him: not in 1935, but in 2025.

Just stepping off the train station in the south-western town of Tauberbischofsheim, one finds Richard-Trunk-Straße running, tellingly, downhill toward the old part of town – as if “downward” were to signify Nazism’s bellowing musical screeches, Trunk, and his ideology.

Top-Nazi Trunk welcomes visitors immediately upon arrival in this town in Baden-Württemberg – infamous as the home state of ruthless Nazi judge and long-time state premier (1966–1978) Hans Filbinger, until his Nazism caught up with him and forced him to resign.

Composer Richard Trunk was born in a house in Tauberbischofsheim on 10 February 1879. The Nazi’s house is ornamented with his name – in golden letters. Locals pave over his Nazi past by saying, “Ah, so Trunk was a composer.”

Nearby stands a war memorial where Tauberbischofsheim commemorates its so-called “heroes” of World War One (1914–1918). Conveniently forgotten is the fact that World War I began when these “heroes” invaded neutral Belgium on 4 August 1914.

It gets worse. The local music school also bears Richard Trunk’s name. By now, this is hardly surprising. In other words, Nazism still holds sway in Tauberbischofsheim.

Meanwhile, Germany’s neo-fascist AfD received 18% of the vote in Tauberbischofsheim in early 2025—slightly below the national average of 21%. Locals, it seems, prefer to stick with conservatism: CDU, 41%.

Of course, there is a Richard Trunk archive, housed in the Richard Trunk Room in the Jägerhäuschen am Schloss. Even at the end of the longest table in the pub Badischer Hof, a picture of Trunk decorates the wall – ornamented with a handwritten greeting and the inscription, “Trunk celebrates at home.” It was made by Trunk himself in 1929.

Apart from the glorification of the Nazi Trunk in Tauberbischofsheim, one can learn more about the town’s “honorary Nazi” in Berlin’s Federal State Archive. Unlike in Nazi-glorifying Tauberbischofsheim, the archive holds Trunk’s official Nazi Party membership card: number 659492, dated autumn 1931.

This is significant. Trunk was an early Nazi. He joined the party before it was brought to power by Germany’s conservatives in a coalition government on 30 January 1933.

In other words, Trunk was no latecomer – no opportunist joining “after” Hitler became Chancellor. Trunk became a Nazi Party member because he was a Nazi.

Declaring his allegiance to Nazism paid off. It had quite the career-promoting effect. Trunk was, in other words, a Nazi who became the namesake of a small town in Baden-Württemberg.

The head of the town’s “Richard Trunk Music School” grows cagey when asked about it, claiming he is merely an employee of the city. He tries to wiggle out of the fact that he runs a Nazi-named institution by saying, “The name of the school is an internal city matter.”

It smacks of: “Nothing to do with me. I don’t run a Nazi music school – and, by the way, who are those Nazis anyway?” As always, Germans know nothing and see nothing.

So far, the city council of Tauberbischofsheim has mostly stood by Nazi Richard Trunk. When the mayor declared in April 2025, during a Bayerischer Rundfunk radio broadcast, that it was time to finally remove his name facing a fierce backlash – something that rarely happens in Tauberbischofsheim.

In other words, locals stick to their beloved Nazi – just as many once voted for Nazi Filbinger to become state premier, or before him for top-Nazi, Blockwart (neighborhood spy), and Nazi snitch Kurt Georg Kiesinger. Unlike Trunk, Kiesinger’s Nazi Party number was 2,633,930 – a late joiner (1 May 1933).

Even the traditional “conservative-Nazi” link that brought Hitler to power still persists in Tauberbischofsheim. CDU boss Elmar Hilbert simply declared: “We see no connection to the Nazi regime” in Trunk.

It flies in one’s face: the photo shows Trunk standing proudly before his beloved Nazi flag, his Party membership number – 659492 – well documented. Yet for conservatives like Hilbert, there is “no connection to the Nazi regime.”

In Tauberbischofsheim, everything remains as it was: Nazis remain Nazis, Nazi glorification remains Nazi glorification, locals support it, and conservatives see no link to Nazism.

Since then, however, Tauberbischofsheim has had a problem. The dispute over Trunk’s Nazism refuses to die down. For decades, the city has clung to a 1948 Spruchkammer “decision” that classified the Nazi musician merely as a “follower” of Nazism – making him almost innocent.

These Spruchkammern were set up to carry out “denazification” – read: renazification – in the western zones of Germany immediately after the war. Thousands were let off the hook, conveniently strengthening West Germany to fight the new enemy: the Soviet Union.

In countless cases, Nazis managed to evade responsibility by buying witnesses. They received so-called Persilscheine – documents whitewashing their Nazi past. The Nazi bigwigs were delighted.

To whitewash the Nazi Trunk, he gathered about a dozen such affidavits. The overall message of these paid-for statements and favours from other Nazis was that Trunk was, in fact, not a Nazi at all.

This tactic became widespread: many “repeatedly” made it look as if they had protected persecuted people from the Nazis. 

Through these Persilscheine, Nazis were turned into “resistance fighters” en masse. Germans became good, innocent bystanders – who saw nothing, knew nothing, and heard nothing.

Yet despite his best efforts, people know about Trunk’s Nazi past today. Fifty-seven years after his death, and with even his enablers gone, people are now beginning to ask questions about his Nazism.

Others demand: “The name has to go.” Until now, most had little knowledge of this man’s Nazi past. Germany’s post-Nazi propaganda machine works to perfection.

The city council’s decision to continue honouring a local Nazi should not be accepted. Yet, the debate is also bubbling elsewhere.

One local demands at least that the music school be renamed – but when questioned by journalists, he refused to have his name published. The spirit of Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft still lingers.

In Tauberbischofsheim, there is only one councillor from Germany’s most progressive party, The Left. He puts it bluntly: “The name has to go!”

Trunk is not only accused of early Nazi Party membership and ideological allegiance but also of setting music to texts by other Nazi authors, including for the “Celebration of the Front.”

His Nazi compositions included the pieces Hitler and Horst Wessel. They were presented to Adolf Hitler at the Reich Chancellery in mid-1934, dedicated to Trunk’s beloved Führer.

Worse, Trunk’s Nazi works were performed no fewer than 165 times in 1933/34 – many Germans loved their Nazi music.

And just when one thinks it cannot get worse – it does. Trunk declared unequivocally: “I believe in Adolf Hitler and his mission!” This was in 1932 – before Hitler became Chancellor. Trunk was an eager signatory.

With such ideological zeal, it is unsurprising that on 18 March 1933, Trunk – then director of the Rheinische Musikschule (Rhine Music School) and conductor of the Männergesangverein (all-male choir) in Cologne – wrote to his “darling” Oberster SA-Führer Ernst Röhm. 

Röhm’s homosexuality was an open secret; he was later murdered by his own comrades during the Night of the Long Knives.

After congratulating Röhm on the Nazi “national revolution,” the adoring Trunk quickly came to the point: it was time for him to get a good job in Munich – the unofficial capital of Nazism.

The following year, Trunk was appointed president of the Munich Academy of Musical Arts – with the “warm endorsement” of the local Nazi Gauleitung in Munich and Upper Bavaria.

He also served as honorary chairman of the Working Group of Nazi Composers from 1934 onward. Nazi Trunk was climbing the career ladder fast.

It should not be forgotten that top-Nazi and anti-Semite Trunk demonized the “evil Jewish spirit in music” – just like Wagner. He left no doubt about his “genuinely German attitudes” – which, after 1933, meant Nazi attitudes.

Meanwhile, the Jewish community of Tauberbischofsheim was far less fortunate. In 1933, 106 Jewish people lived in the town. Wisely, many emigrated soon after Hitler’s rise to power. Those who stayed experienced the typical Nazi treatment: discrimination, disenfranchisement, and murder.

On 3 September 1939, Tauberbischofsheim Nazis organized their own pogrom – without any instruction from Berlin. In other words, Jan Gross’s Jedwabne happened not only in Poland.

On that Sunday, following Germany’s invasion of Poland, all Jews were rounded up by Nazi supporters and taken to the small synagogue on Bachgasse – which had already been destroyed in November 1938.

The men were forced to carry posters reading “We are the warmongers.” At the synagogue, they were made to kiss the ground, then driven into a creek, where they had to perform push-ups in the cold water. 

Fifteen Jewish families were imprisoned for weeks. In 1940, the last Jews from Tauberbischofsheim were deported to the Gurs concentration camp.

Today, many Germans commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust with Stolpersteine – 10 cm brass plaques embedded in the pavement. Yet, if one is truly committed to remembrance, one cannot accept that Trunk continues to be honoured.

By mid-October 2025, a handful of enlightened Tauberbischofsheim residents were planning to lay the town’s very first Stolperstein. 

Something seems to be moving in the Nazi-honouring city of Tauberbischofsheim. One can only hope that the Stolpersteine will not be placed next year within sight of the Nazi-commemorative “Richard-Trunk-Straße.”

Photo: Richard Trunk in 1933 during the inauguration of the street named after him [source: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Trunk]

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