02/05/2026
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He could have left.
Leo Baeck was the most prominent rabbi in Germany and one of the most prominent Jewish theologians in the world. By the late 1930s, he had standing offers from Britain, the United States, and the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. He had been arrested by the Gestapo five times. His congregation had been burned. His wife had died in 1937. His daughter and grand-niece had already been gotten out to England. He had a passport. He had connections. He had every reason and every opportunity to go.
He refused.
He told the people who kept asking him: I will leave Germany when I am the last Jew remaining in it.
He had been born in 1873 in Lissa, in what was then the German Province of Posen and is now western Poland. His father was a rabbi. He had been a brilliant student. He had earned a doctorate in philosophy. He had become a rabbi at twenty-four. He had served as a chaplain in the German Army during the First World War, ministering to Jewish soldiers fighting for the Kaiser. In 1905 he had published a book called The Essence of Judaism that had made him, by his early thirties, one of the leading liberal Jewish thinkers in Europe. In 1912 he had been called to Berlin as senior rabbi of the largest Jewish community in Germany. He had held that pulpit for thirty-one years.
When the N***s came to power in 1933, Baeck was sixty years old.
The German Jewish community appointed him president of a new umbrella organization — the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden — created to defend Jewish life in a country that had decided to dismantle it. He took the job. He spent the next decade in negotiation rooms with N**i officials, arguing for the rights of his people in language they would still entertain, holding the line where it could be held, raising money for emigration when emigration was still possible. Under his leadership, roughly a third of Germany's Jewish population was helped out of the country before the borders closed.
He helped them all leave. He stayed.
In November 1938, on Kristallnacht, the synagogue at Fasanenstrasse where he had served as senior rabbi for twenty-six years was burned. His wife had died the year before. His daughter had been sent to safety in England. He had nothing left in Germany except his community.
In January 1943 the Reichsvereinigung — the successor organization that the N***s had restructured under their control — was disbanded. Leo Baeck, age seventy, was deported to Theresienstadt.
Theresienstadt was a camp in Czechoslovakia. The N***s used it as a propaganda showpiece. They sent diplomats and Red Cross inspectors there. They put on concerts and theatrical performances for visiting officials. They told the world it was a model resettlement community. In reality, of the 140,000 Jews sent to Theresienstadt, fewer than 9,000 came out. The rest died in the camp or were sent further east on transports from which they did not return.
Baeck arrived in January 1943. He was made an honorary member of the camp's Council of Elders. He refused most of the privileges that came with the position. He performed hard labor with the other prisoners. He pulled a hearse used to transport bodies inside the camp.
And he taught.
He gave lectures in the barracks. Not officially. Not authorized. Just lectures — on Plato, on Kant, on Maimonides, on Greek philosophy and Jewish theology and the moral arguments of the Western tradition that he had been teaching for fifty years. He delivered them from memory. He had no books.
Up to seven hundred people would press into a single barracks at a time to hear him.
A camp survivor named Heinrich Liebrecht said later that Baeck's lectures had been the reason he had survived — that they had given him the conviction that his life had a purpose. This was the function the lectures served. Inside a camp designed to strip its prisoners of meaning, an old rabbi stood up in a crowded barracks and reminded them, twice a week, that they were the inheritors of a three-thousand-year tradition of moral thought, and that no one could take this from them.
He also began writing a book.
He wrote it in scraps, on whatever paper he could find. It would later be published as This People Israel: The Meaning of Jewish Existence. It is one of his most important theological works. He wrote most of it inside Theresienstadt while pulling the camp hearse and lecturing in the barracks and, by some accounts, ministering to Christian prisoners as well, who had no chaplain of their own.
By early 1945, his name had appeared on a list. The N***s had decided to kill him. The ex*****on had been scheduled for May 9.
On May 8, the day before, the Red Army arrived at the gates of Theresienstadt and liberated the camp.
He was seventy-two years old.
The other prisoners, in the first hours after liberation, moved to kill the camp guards. Baeck stopped them. He went to each of the men and women who had been planning the killings and persuaded them, one by one, not to do it. He said the work of restoring Jewish life would not begin with revenge. The guards were turned over to Allied authorities.
He stayed in the camp for several more weeks. He refused to be evacuated until the elderly and the sick had been moved to safety. Only then did he agree to be flown to England, where his daughter Ruth was waiting for him.
He never lived in Germany again.
He spent the last eleven years of his life in London, teaching, writing, lecturing in the United States and Britain, helping rebuild the World Union for Progressive Judaism. The Leo Baeck Institute was founded in 1955 to preserve the history of German-speaking Jewry. He was its first president.
He died on November 2, 1956, at eighty-three years old.
Of the 140,000 people sent to Theresienstadt, 9,000 came out alive. Leo Baeck was one of them. He had been seventy years old when he was sent there. He had been offered safe passage out of Germany at sixty-five and had said no. He had been offered it again at sixty-seven and had said no. He had been offered it again at sixty-nine and had said no.
He had said he would leave when the last Jew left.
He nearly kept that promise.
