Germany Confronts Holocaust Legacy Anew..... Again
By NICHOLAS KULISH
In November Germany broke ground on the long-delayed Topography of Terror center at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters. And in October, a huge new exhibition opened at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. At the Dachau camp, outside Munich, a new visitor center is set to open this summer. The city of Erfurt is planning a museum dedicated to the crematoriums. There are currently two exhibitions about the role of the German railways in delivering millions to their deaths.
Wednesday is the 75th anniversary of the day Hitler and the Nazi Party took power in Germany, and the occasion has prompted a new round of soul-searching.
It is not just in edifices and exhibits that the effort to come to terms with this history marches on. The Federal Crime Office last year began investigating itself, trying to shine a light on the Nazi past of its founders after the end of the war. And this month Germany’s federal prosecutor overturned the guilty verdict of Marinus van der Lubbe, the Communist Dutchman executed on charges of setting the Reichstag fire; that event’s 75th anniversary is Feb. 27.
Rüdiger Nemitz first began welcoming back Berlin’s exiled victims of Nazi tyranny, an overwhelming majority of them Jews, in 1969. Berlin flies its former citizens back for a week of visits, all expenses paid and complete with a reception by the mayor.
The Invitation Program for Former Persecuted Citizens of Berlin, which has brought roughly 33,000 people for visits to the city, once had 12 full-time staff members. Now it is just Mr. Nemitz and a half-time employee.
Some say that young Germans, who are required to study the Nazi era and the Holocaust intensively, have shown little indication of letting the theme drop, despite their distance from the events. They say that the younger generation has tackled it as a source not of guilt, but of responsibility on the world stage for social justice and pacifism, including opposition to the war in Iraq.
Others say that the crimes are dealt with only superficially, and that the young will eventually, and perhaps in carefully guarded ways, express their exhaustion with the topic. “I can’t help but feeling that some of the continued, ‘Let’s build monuments; let’s build Jewish museums,’ is a fairly ritualized behavior," Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, an international public research group, said by telephone. “I worry terribly that it’s going to backfire."
Germany’s relationship with its Nazi history still regularly generates controversy, as in the case of the dueling train exhibits. The first, Train of Commemoration, is a locomotive carrying displays detailing the way Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust.
The train is making its way through German cities, open for visitors along the way, ultimately bound for the site of the Auschwitz camp, in Poland. Organizers complain that rather than embrace the project, the national railway, Deutsche Bahn, has hindered it, requiring payment for use of the tracks.
The second exhibition, sponsored by Deutsche Bahn itself, opened in Berlin at the Potsdamer Platz train station last week. Critics have derided “Special Trains to Death” as a response to the first.
The city [Munich] is working on a new museum to be built where the Nazi party headquarters once stood. Called the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, it is expected to open in 2011. The stated goal, according to the museum Web site, “is to create a place of learning for the future.”
To that end, Angelika Baumann of the city’s Department of Arts and Culture has run workshops for schoolchildren 14 to 18 years old. “We’re planning for people who aren’t even born yet,” she said.
Source: New York Times
What a sweet racket "The Holocaust©" has become for the Jews. Not content with heaping guilt upon generation after generation of Germans who had nothing to do with WW II, the Jews make sure that their Holocaust© racket stays fresh in the mind of Germans, especially the impressionable young.
They've not only managed to extort billions of dollars out of Germany for their alleged misdeeds in WW II, they also have the Germans building museums, memorials and the like, showcasing whatever salient point of "The Holocaust©" the Jews wish to display.
Never mind that their own Simon Wiesenthal stated in a
letter published in a January issue of The Stars and Stripes, a newspaper for US military service personnel, that "there were no extermination camps on German soil" during the Second World War. He made the identical statement in a letter published in the April 1975 issue of the British periodical Books and Bookmen.
"Planning for people who aren't even born yet?" Jews know they have the ultimate money making racket in "The Holocaust©" and they aren't about to let this shakedown scheme out of their grips.
No, not as long as they can use guilt trips from manufactured events about "The Holocaust©."
