A name on the "Thousand Friends Wall"
At the Veltins-Arena, the stadium of FC Schalke 04, fans of the club have been able to immortalise themselves with inscriptions on the "Thousand Friends Wall" since 2002. Since 2013, a plaque here has also commemorated the members of the club who were persecuted by the National Socialists. One of them was Arthur Herz.
Born into a Jewish family in Heiligenhaus in 1908, he grew up in Gelsenkirchen. He played in FC Schalke 04's youth teams and completed an apprenticeship as a butcher after school. Because he was Jewish, his club expelled him after the National Socialists came to power. However, Arthur Herz remained true to his passion for football. He joined the Jewish club "Schild Gelsenkirchen". After the November pogroms in 1938, however, the Nazi regime banned all Jewish sports clubs. Arthur Herz survived the pogrom night with a broken arm. Thugs had thrown him out of a window. Despite the increasing terror, he stayed in Gelsenkirchen. He was forced to work in civil engineering and deported to the Riga ghetto with hundreds of Jews at the beginning of 1942.
He passed through several camps in the Baltic states and arrived in Buchenwald from the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk in August 1944. He had to do hard labour on the construction sites in the Rehmsdorf subcamp. The Red Army liberated him in Theresienstadt in May 1945. Arthur Herz returned to Gelsenkirchen and rejoined his club, FC Schalke 04. In 1949, he emigrated to the USA and started a family. Arthur Herz died in Brooklyn in 2006.
