They Survived the Holocaust. 25 Years Later, They Were Burned to Death in Germany.

56 years after an arson attack on a Jewish retirement home in Munich killed 7 Holocaust survivors, German investigators say they have finally identified the man who set the fire.

Aug 20, 2026

They survived the Holocaust.

25 years later, they were burned to death in Germany.

After 56 years, German investigators say they’ve finally identified the man behind the 1970 arson attack on a Jewish retirement home in Munich that killed 7 Holocaust survivors and injured 15 others.

It was Friday night, February 13, 1970. Shabbat had already begun, and around 50 people were inside the Jewish community building at 27 Reichenbachstrasse, a building that contained community offices, apartments for elderly Jews and, behind it, what was then Bavaria’s largest synagogue.

At around 8:45 p.m., a man entered carrying a container filled with roughly 20 liters of gasoline. He took the elevator to the 4th floor and disabled it, then made his way down through the building pouring the gasoline mixture over the wooden staircase. He ignited it near the bottom.

The design of the building did the rest. The wooden stairwell acted like a chimney, carrying the flames upward within seconds while the fire itself cut off the main escape route. The elevator could no longer be used. Elderly residents on the upper floors were trapped above an inferno.

One survivor, Hermann Weitz, had already spent 8 years in Nazi concentration camps. As he watched another attempt to kill Jews in Germany, he reportedly said, “It’s like it was then. Why do we have to be subjected to this again?”

Seven people didn’t make it out. One of them was David Jakubowicz.

Jakubowicz was born in Częstochowa, Poland, in 1910. Under the German occupation he was subjected to forced labor and later imprisoned at a HASAG armaments camp. His wife Hena and his parents were forced into the Częstochowa ghetto. During its liquidation, around 40,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka and murdered. Jakubowicz’s family is believed to have been among them.

He survived.

Near the end of the war he was deported to Buchenwald, then sent to the Laura subcamp, where prisoners were forced to work in an underground weapons factory known as the “Hell in the Slate Mountain.” When the camp was evacuated in April 1945, Jakubowicz was forced onto a death march. He eventually reached Allach, a subcamp of Dachau outside Munich, where American troops liberated the prisoners 10 days later.

After everything Germany had done to him, Jakubowicz remained there for years, eventually moving into the Jewish community building in Munich and working as a cook for the community.

By February 1970, he had decided to leave.

His sister was living in Israel, and Jakubowicz had packed his belongings to join her. He had originally planned to travel around the time of the attack, but he was observant and did not want to fly on Shabbat. He was also preparing food for a Bar Mitzvah being held by the community.

So he stayed.

When the stairwell erupted in flames that Friday night, Jakubowicz tried to escape but could not get through. His watch was later found stopped at 8:57 p.m.

He was 59 years old.

Rosa Drucker was born in Lviv in 1909 and lived there with her husband Leon and their 2 daughters, Scheindla and Chana. In 1942, the family was forced into the Lviv ghetto.

Before the German occupation, Lviv had a Jewish population of more than 160,000. Mass shootings, starvation, deportations to the Belzec extermination camp and the liquidation of the ghetto destroyed almost all of it. Evidence from family documents indicates that Rosa and her family managed to hide during the liquidation and escape both the executions and deportations.

When the Red Army entered Lviv in 1944, Rosa and her family were among only an estimated 200 to 300 Jews still alive there.

She survived that too.

The family eventually reached Germany as displaced persons and tried to get out. They considered Brazil. A planned move to British Mandate Palestine failed. By 1970, Rosa was living in the top floor of the Jewish home in Munich with Georg Eljakim Pfau, a 63 year old upholsterer who had himself survived Nazi extermination camps.

When the fire began, Rosa and Georg tried to escape with another resident, Regina Rivka Becher, a 59 year old milliner born in Czernowitz. They entered the stairwell but the flames were already there. They could not even make it down a single floor.

People outside heard one of the trapped women screaming that they were being burned.

All 3 died.

Max Meir Blum was 71. Born in Poland, he had worked as a furrier and had returned to Germany from New York only the year before the attack. His room was on the top floor.

When he smelled the smoke and heard the cries for help, Blum went to his window and shouted for assistance. His room faced the rear courtyard, however, and the building had lost power. With darkness and smoke around him, he could not see whether rescuers had reached the street.

With the staircase gone, Blum tried to save himself through the window.

He died in the fall.

A few minutes earlier, 69 year old Leopold Arie Leib Gimpel had gone upstairs to Blum’s room for the most ordinary of reasons. He was returning a borrowed book.

Gimpel lived on the 2nd floor with his wife Jeannette. The couple was already planning to leave Germany because they no longer felt safe there. Only months earlier, radicals had tried to bomb the Jewish community center in West Berlin on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Just 3 days before the Munich fire, Palestinian terrorists attacked an El Al flight at Munich’s airport, killing an Israeli passenger.

“We were afraid. We wanted to get away,” Jeannette later told a reporter.

Leopold never got the chance.

By the time he tried to return downstairs from Blum’s room, the staircase was impassable. He took shelter in a bathroom at the end of the hallway, where firefighters later found his body.

Jeannette was rescued from their apartment and taken to the hospital. She reportedly waited for her husband to arrive, still believing that he might have survived, until she was finally told that he was dead.

Siegfried Israel Offenbacher had already been taken from his home once before.

During Kristallnacht in November 1938, the Nazis arrested Offenbacher and deported him to Dachau. He spent more than 2 months there before being released on the condition that he immediately leave Germany and surrender his property.

He fled to British Mandate Palestine.

Then, in 1953, he did something difficult to imagine. He returned to Germany.

Offenbacher attended university lectures in psychology and philosophy and became involved in conversations with young Germans about the Nazi past. He eventually moved into the Jewish community building in Munich and ran its library. He loved hiking and skiing in the Alps.

He celebrated his 71st birthday 4 days before the attack.

Offenbacher was severely hard of hearing, and investigators believe he may have realized too late that the building was on fire. By then, there was nowhere for him to go.

These were the 7 people killed on February 13, 1970: Regina Rivka Becher, Meir Max Blum, Rosa Drucker, Leopold Arie Leib Gimpel, David Jakubowicz, Siegfried Israel Offenbacher and Georg Eljakim Pfau.

For decades, nobody knew for certain who murdered them.

Police initially investigated an enormous range of suspects, from Palestinian extremists to the German radical left and the far right. A 60 member special commission worked the case, but no one was charged. Theories shifted over the years, evidence disappeared, and subsequent investigations went nowhere. Germany’s federal prosecutor reopened the case decades later and closed it again in 2017 after failing to establish a sufficient case against any particular person or group.

Then, in 2025, investigators got a new lead.

A woman came forward with information involving a deceased relative who had been close to a man named Bernd V., a Munich criminal and neo Nazi who was 25 years old when the retirement home burned. The information was considered credible enough for the Munich Public Prosecutor General’s Office to reopen the investigation.

What investigators found was extraordinary.

According to the witness account, Bernd V. and at least 1 accomplice had attempted to burglarize a jewelry store near Gärtnerplatz on the night of February 13, 1970. The burglary failed. Bernd V. allegedly became furious, began ranting about Jews and pointed toward the nearby Jewish community building, threatening to set its residents on fire.

About 15 minutes later, the building was burning.

People who knew Bernd described a man deeply obsessed with Nazism and intensely antisemitic. Witnesses said he listened to recordings of Hitler speeches, owned weapons and traveled to the Obersalzberg, where Hitler had maintained his mountain residence, to explore the Nazi bunker complex and practice shooting.

His criminal record had begun years before the Munich fire. As a teenager he had already carried out explosive attacks on telephone booths. He later took part in safe burglaries and, in 1971, helped steal the 500 year old Blutenburg Madonna from a Munich chapel.

Even more remarkable is that the possible trail to him may have existed for decades.

Years after the attack, a prisoner who had shared a cell with Bernd V. reportedly told authorities that V. had indicated he was responsible for the fire at the Jewish home. The claim was serious enough to surface this year in a German parliamentary inquiry into how authorities had handled the case.

For reasons that remain unclear, the lead did not result in Bernd V. being identified as the killer at the time and he lived for another half century.

He died in 2020.

On August 20, 2026, the Munich Public Prosecutor General announced the conclusion of its renewed investigation. The evidence, investigators said, now points clearly toward the then 25 year old right wing extremist and antisemite as the man who set the fire. Authorities say they found no reliable evidence that anyone else participated in the attack and now believe he acted alone.

There will never be a trial because the suspect is dead, and prosecutors have stressed that the presumption of innocence still applies after death, meaning there can be no final judicial determination of guilt. But after reviewing the archived evidence, interviewing witnesses and comparing the suspect to the offender profile, investigators say the evidence strongly points to him.

That leaves a particularly bitter fact hanging over the case. The man German authorities now believe murdered 7 Holocaust survivors did not disappear after the attack, flee the country or die before anyone could have found him. He remained alive until 2020, while investigators looked elsewhere.

At the funeral for the victims in Munich on February 18, 1970, Maximilian Taucher, then president of Munich’s Jewish community, tried to describe what had just happened.

“What could not be accomplished in the gas chambers was completed in the retirement home 25 years later.”

At the time, nobody knew who had done it.

56 years later, German investigators say they finally do.

May their memories be a blessing.

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