He is credited by German and Jewish sources to be the key person of the exemption of the Krnov Synagogue from destruction in the November 1938 pogrom.
End of October 1938, the mayor of Jägerndorf, Oskar König (in office from 1938 to 1940), had received a secret order from Berlin by phone to destroy and burn down the synagogue of his town on 9 November.
[1] The Sudeten councillors then unanimously accepted the proposal of the builder Franz Irblich to deceive the Nazis: They decided to remove all symbols of the Jewish religion from the building and change it into a town market hall, reporting to Berlin that there was no synagogue in Jägerndorf which could be destroyed.
[citation needed] To deceive the responsibles in Berlin even more, on 9 November the local officials set on fire two barrels of gasoline in front of the city's Jewish cemetery which produced big clouds of dark smoke.
[4] After the world war II, the synagogue was used by the Czechoslovak state first as a warehouse, then as a local archive building.