Its name is Celtic and means breakwater. The rootBreis can also be found in the French word briser meaning to break. The hill on which Breisach came into existence was — at least when there was a flood — in the middle of the Rhine, until the Rhine was straightened by the engineer Johann Gottfried Tulla in the 19th century, thus breaking its surge.
History
The seat of a Celtic prince was at the hill on which Breisach is built. The Romans maintained an auxiliarycastle on Mons Brisiacus (which came from the Celtic word Brisger, which means waterbreak).
The Staufer dynasty founded Breisach as a city in the modern sense, but there had already been a settlement with a church at the time. An 11th-century coin from Breisach was found in the Sandur hoard.
In the early 13th century, construction on the St. Stephansmünster, Breisach's cathedral, started. In the early 16th century, Breisach was a significant stronghold of the Holy Roman Empire. On December 7, 1638, Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, who was subsidized by France, conquered the city, which Ferdinand II and General Hans Heinrich IX. von Reinach had defended well, and tried to make it the centre of a new territory. After Bernard's death in 1639, his general gave the territory to France, which saw it as its own conquest. In the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Breisach was de jure given to France.
During World War II, 85% of Breisach was destroyed by Allied artillery as the Allies crossed the Rhine. The St. Stephansmünster was also heavily damaged.
In 1969, Breisach was considered as the construction site for a nuclear power plant, but Wyhl was chosen instead, where the construction project was later abandoned in the face of heavy opposition.
The nearby cities of Hochstetten (1970), Gündlingen (1972), Niederrimsingen (1973), and Oberrimsingen (1975) along with Grezhausen, which had been incorporated into Oberrimsingen in 1936, were all incorporated into Breisach.
Politics
After the municipal elections on June 13, 2004, the seats in the municipal council were distributed as follows:
The first documentation of Jews in town dates to 1301.[3] During the Black Death in 1349, the community was annihilated after a false blood libel, accusing the town Jews of poisoning the town wells. After the pogrom, Jews got back to the town until 1424, when they were expelled once again.[3]
In 1550, the community reopened with a cemetery.[4] In 1750, a Jew owned a textile factory in town, employing about 330 weavers.[5] The Synagogue, built in 1758, was destroyed in November 1938, on Kristallnacht.[5] In 1825, 14% of the town population was Jewish, (438 individuals), though in 1933 this number had declined to 231. On October 22, 1940, the town's last 34 Jews who did not flee to nearby France or other places, were deported to Gurs internment camp, a transit camp in the South of France.[5] In 1967, the town's sole Jewish survivor was a woman who tended the two Jewish cemeteries.[5]
A website, dedicated to the town's Jewish history, commemorates the names of Jewish victims during World War II who used to live in town,[6] as also personal stories of survivors and their children.[7] A Jewish survivor who lived in town named Louis Dreyfuss, gave a report on his biography on some cases.[8]
The Jewish community of pre-war Breisach maintains a documentary website.[9]