A German delegation led by Armin Laschet, the premier of Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day at the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on Sunday.
Laschet laid a wreath at the camp’s execution wall along with a group of young German Jews, Muslims and Christians.
“Auschwitz shows what can happen when people’s worst qualities come to bear,” Laschet said. “The inconceivable crimes of the past must be a warning and an obligation for every new generation,” he added.
Camp survivors also laid flowers at the execution wall wearing striped scarves reminiscent of their camp uniforms.
Some Polish survivors wore a red “P” on their uniform, the mark Nazi guards gave them to identify the prisoners as Polish.
More than a million people, the vast majority Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War II. Nazi forces held many Polish prisoners there before converting it into a death camp when the war broke out.
Memory of Holocaust ‘crumbling’
In a guest column for Germany’s Die Welt newspaper, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, noting a recent rise in anti-Semitism in Germany, wrote that the country’s “culture of remembrance is crumbling” amid “pressure from the extreme right.”
Maas cited a CNN study that found 40 percent of young Germans don’t know much about the Holocaust. “These are shocking figures that we can’t idly resign ourselves to,” he said.
Schoolchildren needed “new approaches” so that they not only remember the crimes of Nazi Germany, but also learn present-day lessons from them, he said.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Wannsee House
The villa on Berlin’s Wannsee lake was pivotal in planning the Holocaust. Fifteen members of the Nazi government and the SS Schutzstaffel met here on January 20, 1942 to plan what became known as the “Final Solution,” the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory. In 1992, the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held was turned into a memorial and museum.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Dachau
The Nazi regime opened the first concentration camp in Dauchau, not far from Munich. Just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power it was used by the paramilitary SS “Schutzstaffel” to imprison, torture and kill political opponents to the regime. Dachau also served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi camps that followed.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Nazi party rally grounds
Nuremberg hosted the biggest Nazi party propaganda rallies from 1933 until the start of the Second World War. The annual Nazi party congress as well as rallies with as many as 200,000 participants took place on the 11-km² (4.25 square miles) area. Today, the unfinished Congress Hall building serves as a documentation center and a museum.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Bergen-Belsen
The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony was initially established as a prisoner of war camp before becoming a concentration camp. Prisoners too sick to work were brought here from other concentration camps, so many also died of disease. One of the 50,000 killed here was Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who gained international fame posthumously after her diary was published.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Buchenwald Memorial
Buchenwald near the Thuringian town of Weimar was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. From 1937 to April 1945, the National Socialists deported about 270,000 people from all over Europe here and murdered 64,000 of them.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Memorial to the German Resistance
The Bendlerblock building in Berlin was the headquarters of a military resistance group. On July 20, 1944, a group of Wehrmacht officers around Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg carried out an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler that failed. The leaders of the conspiracy were summarily shot the same night in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, which is today the German Resistance Memorial Center.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Hadamar Euthanasia Center
From 1941 people with physical and mental disabilities were killed at a psychiatric hospital in Hadamar in Hesse. Declared “undesirables” by the Nazis, some 15,000 people were murdered here by asphyxiation with carbon monoxide or by being injected with lethal drug overdoses. Across Germany some 70,000 were killed as part of the Nazi euthanasia program. Today Hadamar is a memorial to those victims.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Holocaust Memorial
Located next to the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated sixty years after the end of World War II on May 10, 2005, and opened to the public two days later. Architect Peter Eisenman created a field with 2,711 concrete slabs. An attached underground “Place of Information” holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Memorial to persecuted homosexuals
Not too far from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, another concrete memorial honors the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The four-meter high monument, which has a window showing alternately a film of two men or two women kissing, was inaugurated in Berlin’s Tiergarten on May 27, 2008.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Sinti and Roma Memorial
Opposite the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, a park inaugurated in 2012 serves as a memorial to the 500,000 Sinti and Roma people killed by the Nazi regime. Around a memorial pool the poem “Auschwitz” by Roma poet Santino Spinelli is written in English, Germany and Romani: “gaunt face, dead eyes, cold lips, quiet, a broken heart, out of breath, without words, no tears.”
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
‘Stolpersteine’ – stumbling blocks as memorials
In the 1990s, the artist Gunther Demnig began a project to confront Germany’s Nazi past. Brass-covered concrete cubes placed in front of the former houses of Nazi victims, provide details about the people and their date of deportation and death, if known. More than 45,000 “Stolpersteine” have been laid in 18 countries in Europe – it’s the world’s largest decentralized Holocaust memorial.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Brown House in Munich
Right next to the “Führerbau” where Adolf Hitler had his office, was the headquarters of the Nazi Party in Germany, in the “Brown House” in Munich. A white cube now occupies its former location. A new “Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism” opened on April 30, 2015, 70 years after the liberation from the Nazi regime, uncovering further dark chapters of history.
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A day earlier, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said it was Germany’s responsibility to show “zero tolerance” toward xenophobia and all forms of anti-Semitism.
Read more: Holocaust remembrance in Germany: A changing culture
Israeli president applauds reconciliation
In Israel, President Reuven Rivlin commended German and Jewish reconciliation efforts as he met with the German ambassador, Holocaust survivors and German volunteer group Action Reconciliation Service for Peace (ARSP).
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Jewish memorials in Berlin
The Holocaust Memorial
A huge field of stelae in the center of the German capital was designed by New York architect Peter Eisenmann. The almost 3,000 stone blocks commemorate the six million Jewish people from all over Europe who were murdered by the National Socialists.
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Jewish memorials in Berlin
The “Stumbling Stones”
Designed by German artist Gunther Demnig, these brass plates are very small — only 10 by 10 centimeters (3.9 x 3.9 inches). The stumbling stones mark the homes and offices from which people were deported by the Nazis. More than 7,000 of them have been placed across Berlin, 70,000 across Europe, and in 2017 the first stones were also laid in outside Europe, in Buenos Aires.
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Jewish memorials in Berlin
The Wannsee Conference House
Fifteen high-ranking Nazi officials met in this villa on the Wannsee Lake on January 20, 1942 to discuss the systematic murder of European Jews, which they termed the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. Today the house is a memorial that informs visitors about the unimaginable dimension of the genocide that was decided here.
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Jewish memorials in Berlin
Track 17 Memorial
White roses on track 17 at Grunewald station remember the more than 50,000 Berlin Jews who were sent to their deaths from here. 186 steel plates show the date, destination and number of deportees. The first train went to the Litzmannstadt ghetto (Lodz, Poland) on October 18, 1941; the last train to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on January 5, 1945.
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Jewish memorials in Berlin
Otto Weidt’s Workshop for the Blind
Today, the Hackesche Höfe in Berlin Mitte are mentioned in every travel guide. They are a backyard labyrinth in which many Jewish people lived and worked — for example in the brush factory of the German entrepreneur Otto Weidt. During the Nazi era he employed many blind and deaf Jews and saved them from deportation and death. The workshop of the blind is now a museum.
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Jewish memorials in Berlin
Fashion Center Hausvogteiplatz
The heart of Berlin’s fashion metropolis once beat here. A memorial sign made of high mirrors recalls the Jewish fashion designers and stylists who made clothes for the whole of Europe at Hausvogteiplatz. The National Socialists expropriated the Jewish owners and handed over the fashion stores to Aryan employees. Berlin’s fashion center was irretrievably destroyed during the Second World War.
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Jewish memorials in Berlin
Memorial at Koppenplatz
Before the Holocaust, 173,000 Jews lived in Berlin; in 1945 there were only 9,000. The monument “Der verlassene Raum” (The Deserted Room) is located in the middle of the Koppenplatz residential area in Berlin’s Mitte district. It is a reminder of the Jewish citizens who were taken from their homes without warning and never returned.
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Jewish memorials in Berlin
The Jewish Museum
Architect Daniel Libeskind chose a dramatic design: viewed from above, the building looks like a broken Star of David. The Jewish Museum is one of the most visited museums in Berlin, offering an overview of the turbulent centuries of German Jewish history.
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Jewish memorials in Berlin
Weissensee Jewish Cemetery
There are still eight remaining Jewish cemeteries in Berlin, the largest of them in the Weissensee district. With over 115,000 graves, it is the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe. Many persecuted Jews hid in the complex premises during the Nazi era. On May 11, 1945, only three days after the end of the Second World War, the first postwar Jewish funeral service was held here.
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Jewish memorials in Berlin
The New Synagogue
When the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse was first consecrated in 1866 it was considered the largest and most magnificent synagogue in Germany. The only one of Berlin’s 13 synagogues to survive the Kristallnacht pogroms, it later burned down due to Allied bombs. It was reconstructed and opened again in 1995. Since then, the 50-meter-high golden dome once again dominates Berlin’s cityscape.
“There can never be forgiveness for the terror and suffering of Jewish children during the dark years of the Second World War,” he said.
“But there can be reconciliation between the German people and the Jewish people today, and there is no better example of reconciliation than what you are doing here, throughout Israel.”
ARSP works with Holocaust survivors and their descendants to promote international peace. It was founded in 1958 in Germany to confront the country’s Nazi past.
Read more: Book shows Hitler’s Holocaust plans for Canada, US
Germany has officially observed January 27 as Holocaust Remembrance Day since 1996. The United Nations declared it an international day of observance in 2005.
Read more: Opinion: Germany’s historical obligation continues
amp/rc (dpa, AFP, AP)
Article source: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-marks-international-holocaust-remembrance-day/a-47255155