Hennweiler


Hennweiler is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Bad Kreuznach district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde Kirner Land, whose seat is in the town of Kirn.

Geography

Location

Hennweiler lies in the southern Hunsrück. Looming north of the municipality is the Lützelsoon plateau, while to the west lies the Hahnenbach valley. East of the village is found the Kellenbach valley. A few kilometres to the south, the Hunsrück falls off into the Nahe valley. Hennweiler lies roughly 31 km west of the district seat of Bad Kreuznach, 15 km northeast of Idar-Oberstein and a like distance west-northwest of Bad Sobernheim. Hennweiler's municipal area, measuring slightly over 14 km2, is the biggest in the Verbandsgemeinde of Kirn-Land, and more than half of it is wooded. The village's elevation is 374 m above sea level. The village is well linked with its neighbours and the broader highway netweork by three Kreisstraßen. Hennweiler has some 1,400 inhabitants.

Neighbouring municipalities

Clockwise from the north, Hennweiler's neighbours are the municipalities of Schlierschied, Kellenbach, Heinzenberg, Oberhausen bei Kirn, Hahnenbach, Sonnschied, Bruschied and Woppenroth. The first and last named municipalities lie in the neighbouring Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis while Sonnschied, whose boundary with Hennweiler amounts to only a few metres, lies in the neighbouring Birkenfeld district. Hennweiler also comes to within a few metres of the municipality of Brauweiler, but does not actually touch it.

Constituent communities

Also belonging to Hennweiler are the outlying homesteads of Algendellerhof and Schlößchen Wasem.

History

Hennweiler's vast municipal area has been settled since earliest times. Archaeological research has been able to prove that there was human habitation in the area between 600 and 400 BC. With the Roman takeover of the Rhine’s left bank in the last century of the pre-Christian era, the time that followed brought the Treveri, a people of mixed Celtic and Germanic stock, cultural dominance, but enrichment, too. Various archaeological finds in Hennweiler from Celtic and Roman times bear witness to settlers who were members of these two peoples. In 992, Hennweiler had its first documentary mention in a by king Otto III: the king, under Archbishop of Mainz Willigis’s aegis, donated the royal estate of Hanenwilare to the only recently founded Saint Stephen’s Foundation in Mainz. It is quite likely that under this foundation's influence, the building of the parish church, Saint Stephen’s, as the mother church in the parish of Hennweiler came about. This parish region was in the Middle Ages coterminous with the Vogtei of Hennweiler, which comprised, as a judicial and administrative body, the villages of Hennweiler, Oberhausen, Guntzelnberg, Rode, Heinzenberg and the estate of Eigen. The centres of Guntzelnberg and Rode, which lay at the limit of the Hahnenbach and Bruschied estate areas, are believed to have been forsaken and to have vanished even before the Thirty Years' War. The Vogtei of Hennweiler, as a fief of the Counts of Veldenz, was given in the 13th or 14th century to the Lords of Heinzenberg. This administrative body, now called the Amt of Hennweiler, along with another, the Amt of Hahnenbach, formed the Imperial lordship of Wartenstein, whose seat was at Castle Wartenstein. In the 16th century, the Lords of Schwarzenberg were the local lords, as was later the baronial family of Warsberg in the 17th and 18th centuries. Under the Lords of Schwarzenberg, a market was introduced in 1555. About the middle of the 18th century, Hennweiler began to see considerable population growth and expansion. In the summer of 1781, though, on 28 August, more than two thirds of the village burnt down in a great fire. In the years 1790–1792, the parish church’s nave was reconstructed. After French Revolutionary troops had overrun and occupied the German lands on the Rhine’s left bank, the French imposed a new administrative order on the French Revolutionary model. Indeed, there were French administrative reforms in 1798, 1800 and 1802. Under Napoleonic French rule, the local people became French under French law from 1802 to 1813 or 1814. Hennweiler belonged to the Mairie of Kirn in the Arrondissement of Simmern, which itself belonged to the Department of Rhin-et-Moselle. After French rule ended, there was a short transitional time after which the new political order laid out by the Congress of Vienna came into force. Under its terms, Hennweiler was grouped into the Kingdom of Prussia, wherein it found itself in the Kreuznach district. The Mairie of Kirn became the Bürgermeisterei of Kirn. From 1858, the outlying rural municipalities formed their own rural mayoralty, but this was governed in “personal union” by the mayor of the town of Kirn. This arrangement was abolished in 1896 and the representatives of the rural villages elected their own mayor. On 1 October 1968, what had hitherto been known as an Amt now came to be called a Verbandsgemeinde. In the course of administrative restructuring in Rhineland-Palatinate, Hennweiler became one of 20 municipalities in the Verbandsgemeinde of Kirn-Land in 1969.

Municipality’s name

The village's name likely goes back to a Frankish settler's name, which might have been “Hagano” or “Hano”. He might have founded a settlement here in the time of the Frankish taking of the land in the 6th and 7th centuries. On the other hand, he might also have given an existing settlement his own name.

Jewish history

Hennweiler had a Jewish community until 1938 or 1939. It arose in the 18th century. Already by 1680, though, individual Jews were being mentioned as being in the village. It was in that year that the first mention of a jüdte came. He apparently had some protection money to pay. In 1685, a “Jud Heim” was mentioned. In the 18th century, the number of Jews in the village grew. There came to be four Jewish families in Hennweiler. In 1749, the lordship of the Lords of Warsberg decreed a Judenordnung for the Amt of Wartenstein. In 1753, the Synagogenordnung for the synagogue in Hennweiler was signed by Abraham, Löb Nathan, Hertz, Gümpell, Abraham Jacob, Löb, Manche Samuel, Mayer and Itzig. The frightful great fire on 28 August 1781, which burnt down two thirds of Hennweiler and also killed some people, also hit the village's Jewish families very hard. Feist Isaac's and Jospel Moises's families were left homeless when their houses were lost in the fire. The synagogue burnt down, too. In the 19th century, the number of Jewish inhabitants developed as follows: in Hennweiler about 1850, 70 Jewish inhabitants; in 1895, 42 ; in Bruschied in 1895, 16 Jewish inhabitants. The Jewish families living in Bruschied, who had been part of the Gemünden Jewish community since 1814, were now grouped into the Hennweiler community. In the way of institutions, there were a synagogue, a mikveh and a graveyard. To provide for the community's religious needs, a schoolteacher was hired for a time, who also busied himself as the hazzan and the shochet. About 1924, when the Jewish community numbered 36 persons, the head of the community was J. Vogel. In 1932, it was Salomon Kahn. Working as a teacher in the village was Hermann Elter from Kirn, who taught the children in religion.
In 1933, the year when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seized power in Germany, there were still 30 Jews living in Hennweiler. In the years that followed, though, some of the Jews emigrated in the face of the boycotting of their businesses, the progressive stripping of their rights and repression, all brought about by the Nazis. On the evening after Kristallnacht, there were excesses in the village at the NSDAP district leader's urging. In the violence that ensued, the synagogue was desecrated, among other things. The last four Jewish families left Hennweiler in August and September 1939 and moved to Cologne or Nuremberg. The last four members of the Jewish community in Bruschied were deported to concentration camps in 1942. According to Yad Vashem's lists and information from the work Gedenkbuch - Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933–1945, the following members of Hennweiler's Jewish community fell victim to the Holocaust :
  • Otto Dornhard
  • Laura Goldberg née Braun
  • Rosa Joseph née Scholem
  • Hans Kahn
  • Wilhelm Kahn
  • Emma Nieteckmann née Dornhard
  • Henriette Römer née Sender
  • Siegfried Römer
  • Leopold Schmelzer
  • Sigmund Sender
  • Mathilde Steiner née Braun
  • Wilhelm Vogel
Likewise, the following members of the outlying community in Bruschied died:
  • Johanna Baum née Bonem
  • Samuel Baum
  • Siegmund Baum
  • Florina Braun née Dornhard
  • Alma Dornhard
  • Auguste Dornhardt
  • Kurt Dornhard
In 1985, in memory of the Jews who were driven out of Hennweiler and murdered, a memorial stone was placed at the municipality's Christian graveyard. Another was set at the mortuary at the graveyard in Bruschied. A former Jewish inhabitant named Max Sender came back to his home village after 1945. He was buried at the Jewish graveyard in 1985.

Synagogue

At first, the Jewish community had to make do with a simple prayer room that had been set up in one of the Jewish houses. In the Judenordnung decreed by the Warsberg lordship in 1749, it was stipulated that a synagogue was not to be built too near the church. Shortly after 1750, a new synagogue was established; a new decree, a Synagogenordnung, was made for that to regulate the “ritual character” in the “shul at Hennweiler”. To be able to hold regular services, Jewish inhabitants from Bruschied and Schneppenbach also came to Hennweiler. In the 1781 great fire, the house that contained the prayer room was burnt down. It is not known when the Jewish community managed to set up a new one. It is believed that in the 1830s, community members Joseph Gottschall and his wife Sara acquired a building that could be used to establish a synagogue. For this synagogue, there came in February 1838 from the Israelite Consistory a new edict. By 1868 the building had fallen into disrepair and badly needed to be renovated. In 1895, the building had once again fallen into such disrepair that it was closed by police order. There were plans to build a new synagogue. Since, however, most Jewish families lived in relative poverty, it was thought that, among other things, a door-to-door collection in other Jewish communities in the Regierungsbezirke of Koblenz and Trier might be undertaken to raise the needed funds, but the authorities forbade this. In 1896, approval was granted to build a new synagogue. Master mason Johann Böres, from Hennweiler, built the new place of worship on Obergasse ; the quarrystone and the sand was put at the builders’ disposal by the municipality from its own quarry. The new synagogue was consecrated amid much merrymaking on 22 August 1896. Until the mid 1930s, the Hennweiler synagogue was the hub of the local Hennweiler-Bruschied Jewish community's religious life. The land title register listed the following as the synagogue's owners: Martin Becker, Bernhard Braun, Salomon Kahn, Alexander Sender, Max Sender, Jakob Schmelzer, Moses Vogel, Jacob Vogel, Lazarus Jakobi, Leopold Binnes and Siegmund Sender, all of whom were from Hennweiler, and Michael Bornhard I and Michael Bornhard II, both of whom were from Bruschied. During the pogrom in November 1938, the synagogue was defiled. The windows and doors were smashed up and the pews were chopped up with axes. The Torah scrolls as well as other written matter, and the Judaica were burnt out in the street. In the spring of 1939, the Jewish community was forced by the Nazis to sell the synagogue property and the Jewish graveyard to the municipality. In the winter of 1939/1940, the synagogue building was further desecrated by being used by Wehrmacht troops as a munitions storage. It was then used from August 1940 to February 1945 as a school gymnasium. After 1945, the building was once more transferred to the municipality according to a decision handed down at restitution proceedings in March 1951. The municipality then sold it to a private citizen, and before the year had ended, the new owner had had it torn down so that a house could be built on the lot. The synagogue's address was Obergasse 29.