Out of Passau: Leaving a City Hitler Called Home - Tapa dura

Anna Elisabeth Rosmus began her life's work unexpectedly at age 20 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.