Öhningen/Stein am Rhein - Cioma Schönhaus (Intro)

Searching for clues about a secretly border crossing from Germany to Switzerland during the Second World War. Cioma Schönhaus, born in 1922, lived as a twenty-year-old with his Jewish family in Berlin during the Second World War. In 1942 they were to be deported. When the IDs were checked, Ciamo was sent home again because he worked in the arm industry and his employer has declared him as indispensable. He has never seen his parents since. At that time, German ID cards were collected in the offering box of the confessional church. Knowing that this could save Jews, these Germans took a great risk. If the Gestapo had examined the offering box they would have been in big trouble. Schönhaus sold his deported parents' home furnishings and began forging these ID cards with new photos and stamps. In return he received ration cards. To do this, he repeatedly rented furnished rooms and lived underground. In this way he was able to save around two hundred Jews. In 1943 he had a mishap when he lost his own fake ID card. And that with a current photo. The Gestapo became aware of him and began searching for him with a wanted poster. He forged his own military ID card for soldiers on furlough and a friend got him a bicycle.

In the early morning on Tuesday, September 7, 1943 he fled from Berlin. It wasn't a hectic escape and he had no intention yet of going over the border to Switzerland. As there were not enough people, there hang ripe apples at the trees all along the roads. For a week he went from town to town and always registered correctly. With his forged ID. Until his data was in Berlin, he was already in the next city. When he made it to Radolfzell on Lake Constance he started making plans to get to Switzerland. At first he thought about swimming across the Lower Lake Constance. With the help of the bicycle inner tubes. He scraped this idea and invented a story to get across the border legally. He cycled to Öhningen with a bouquet of flowers on his bike. There he met two German soldiers and was also checked. Everything went perfectly. He rang the bell at a manor and told his story to find out about the possibility of crossing the border. But there were misunderstandings and he no longer trusted the matter. Everything can be exaggerated, he said on a talk show. He had a map and while looking for a way to cross the border, he came to a small stream. He followed the little stream and decided to start running if someone called Halt. But his courage failed him when there was a rustling in the bushes. He stopped and raised his hands. A deer scurried past. He crawled across the border in the stream and reached a pond in Switzerland. Soaking wet, he went to Stein am Rhein. The first passer-by he spoke to was a Thurgau cantonal police officer in civilian clothes. Cioma Schönhaus was lucky again and was not rejected by the Swiss border authorities, but is instead recognized as a refugee.

He lived a good life in Switzerland and kept quiet about his story and the fact that he was Jewish. It was only at the age of 80 that he decided to tell his story and wrote a book. Movies were made (The Forger/The Invisibles), he gave interviews and was on a talk show on Swiss television in 2004. He died on September 22, 2015 in Biel-Benken (BL).

Because I only recently became aware of the story, I couldn't ask him myself. I wanted to see the route he took across the border. Unfortunately, this part of the escape is not implemented in the movies. This would have made for an exciting conclusion to the story, where you wouldn't have known whether he would make it or not. There is only the mention to the stream and the pond, but I found it. This is how these photos were taken. Unspectacular landscape shots with an adventurous background. Eighty years later. In the last picture I have entered the photo positions and the escape route on a map from back then. However, these are not confirmed findings, but rather my interpretation when exploring the area. At that time there was a second stream crossing the border. However, it ran in open areas and was covered over around this time. The green border was guarded but not defended. The Swiss defensive line ran along the Rhine, and the areas around Schaffhausen would have been left to the Germans in an attack.

This first photo shows the most likely starting point north of Öhningen in Germany, 500 m from the Swiss border. In the distance on the left you can see some houses of Öhningen and on the right a field path leads towards the border. Switzerland, February 18, 2024. (1/12)

Talkshow SRF 2004 auf Schweizerdeutsch.

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Taken in: Germany / Baden-Württemberg / Landkreis Konstanz / Öhningen (show map)

Taken on: February 18, 2024

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Sets appears in: • Cioma Schönhaus 1943

Groups appears in: • History : images without words don't document

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