Romania to open first national Holocaust museum

Romania’s President Klaus Iohannis on Tuesday approved the creation of the country’s first Holocaust museum in Bucharest aimed at informing the public and shedding light on the Nazi-allied regime’s role during World War II.

Read more: The Nazi archives: Where Germany’s dark past is stored on paper

“The history of Jewish Romanians, their contribution to the country’s development and the tragedy experienced during the war… represent a legacy which was hidden from us for decades,” Iohannis said Tuesday at a ceremony attended by Holocaust survivors.

“This museum will not so much bring answers as raise more questions,” he added.

“The Romanian state demonstrates consistency in meeting the goal aimed at recovering the memory of the Holocaust, strengthening the education about the Holocaust and combating anti-Semitism,” Iohannis said.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Serving the fatherland

  Many German Sinti fought for Germany not only in the First World War but also in the Wehrmacht from 1939 on. In 1941 the German high command ordered all “Gypsies and Gypsy half-breeds” to be dismissed from active military service for “racial-political reasons.” Alfons Lampert and his wife Elsa were then deported to Auschwitz, where they were killed.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Measuring and registering race

  Eva Justin, a nurse and anthropologist, learned the Romani language to gain the trust of Sinti and Roma. As a specialist in so-called scientific racism, she traveled through Germany to measure people and create a complete registry of “Gypsies” and “Gypsy half-breeds” — the basis for the genocide. She and others researched family ties and and assessed churches’ baptismal records.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Locked up and dispossessed

  In the 1930s, Sinti and Roma families were in many places forced into camps on the outskirts of town, surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by guards with dogs, like here in Ravensburg in southwestern Germany. They were unable to leave. Their pets were killed. They had to work as slave laborers. Many were forcibly sterilized.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Deportation in broad daylight

  In May 1940 Sinti and Roma families were sent through the streets of the town of Asperg in southwestern Germany to the train station and deported directly to Nazi-occupied Poland. “The dispatchment went smoothly,” a police report noted. Most of those deported traveled to their deaths in work camps and Jewish ghettos.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  From school to Auschwitz

  Karl Kling appears on this class picture from Karlsruhe in the late 1930s. He was collected from school in spring 1943 and sent to the “Gypsy Camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he became one of the victims of the genocide. Survivors reported that before being deported they had been marginalized in their schools and sometimes weren’t even able to take part in lessons.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Greeted with an evil lie

  “I can work,” thought nine-year-old Hugo Höllenreiner when he arrived at Auschwitz in a cattle car with his family in 1943. He was greeted by the phrase “Arbeit macht frei” (“work will set you free”) above the entrance. It offered hope, Höllenreiner remembered later. He wanted to help his father work: “Then we could be free again.” Only one out of every ten people deported to Auschwitz survived.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Brutal experiments by the ‘Angel of Death’

  Notorious SS doctor Josef Mengele worked at Auschwitz. He and his colleagues tortured countless prisoners. They mutilated children, infected them with diseases and carried out brutal experiments on twins. Mengele sent eyes, organs and entire body parts back to Berlin. In June 1944, he sent the head of a 12-year-old child. He escaped Europe after the war and never faced trial.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Liberation comes too late

  When Russia’s Red Army arrived at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, children were among the prisoners. But for the Sinti and Roma, the liberation came too late. On the night of August 2-3, 1944, the officers in charge of Auschwitz ordered those remaining in the “Gypsy Camp” sent to the gas chambers. Two children came crying out of the barracks the next morning and were subsequently murdered.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Racially persecuted

  After the concentration camps were liberated, allied and German authorities issued survivors certificates of racial persecution and imprisonment. Later, many people were told they had only been persecuted for criminal reasons, and their requests for compensation were denied. Hildegard Reinhardt (above) lost her three young daughters in Auschwitz.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  Calling for recognition

  In the early 1980s, representatives of the Sinti and Roma communities staged a hunger strike at the entrance of the former Dachau concentration camp. They were protesting the criminalization of their minority and calling for the recognition of Nazi persecution. In 1982, then-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt officially recognized the Sinti and Roma as victims of Nazi genocide.

• Remembering Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma

  A memorial in Berlin

  In 2012, a memorial for the Sinti and Roma victims of Nazi persecution was erected near the Bundestag in Berlin. The site is a reminder of the fight against discrimination for the world’s Sinti and Roma, particularly on International Romani Day. To this day, members of the minority still experience discrimination in Germany and around Europe.

  Author: Andrea Grunau

Elie Wiesel’s role

The country had long downplayed any role in the Holocaust, but in 2004 an international panel led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel estimated that between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews perished from territories under Romanian administration.  It also found 11,000 Roma were killed.

Only 3,200 Jews still live in Romania, according to the last census in 2011.

The new museum, coordinated by the Elie Wiesel Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, will be located in an eight-storey building in central Bucharest.

Romania switched sides in the war in 1944. The communist regime that later followed did little to uncover crimes committed during the Holocaust.

• ‘Never Again’: Memorials of the Holocaust

  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.

• ‘Never Again’: Memorials of the Holocaust

  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.

• ‘Never Again’: Memorials of the Holocaust

  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.

• ‘Never Again’: Memorials of the Holocaust

  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.

• ‘Never Again’: Memorials of the Holocaust

  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.

• ‘Never Again’: Memorials of the Holocaust

  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.

• ‘Never Again’: Memorials of the Holocaust

  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.

• ‘Never Again’: Memorials of the Holocaust

  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.

• ‘Never Again’: Memorials of the Holocaust

  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.

• ‘Never Again’: Memorials of the Holocaust

  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.”

• ‘Never Again’: Memorials of the Holocaust

  ‘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.

• ‘Never Again’: Memorials of the Holocaust

  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.

  Author: Max Zander, Ille Simon

cw/se (AFP, Reuters)

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