Out of Passau
Leaving a City Hitler Called Home
Anna Elisabeth Rosmus
Translated from the German by
Imogen von Tannenberg
Anna Elisabeth Rosmus began her life’s work unexpectedly at age twenty when she wrote
an essay about her hometown during the Third Reich for a national contest. She never
dreamed her youthful research would be the start of a distinguished publishing career and
that her life would be the basis for the 1990 Academy Award–nominated film The Nasty
Girl.
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.
A sequel to Against the Stream, Out of Passau is Rosmus’s second book about her
fateful decision to expose her hometown’s Nazi past. In this volume Rosmus recounts her
determination after years of persecution, threats, and physical attacks to immigrate to the
United States. Despite the praise she had earned around the world, officials and citizens
of Passau continued to obstruct her work. In this memoir, Rosmus relives her turmoil
over whether to stay in Passau or to leave; describes the more open-minded world she
found in Washington, D.C.; and discusses how she has been able to carry on her research
from the United States.
ANNA ELISABETH ROSMUS is the recipient of many awards for her struggle against
bigotry and anti-Semitism. Her writings
about Nazism and neo-Nazism have educated generations of Germans and nonGermans, particularly those born after 1945,
about the Holocaust. Rosmus lives near the
Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.
IMOGEN VON TANNENBERG is currently
an adjunct faculty member at the University
of Southern California. Von Tannenberg lives
in Venice, California.
OUT OF PASSAU
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