Sachsenhausen museum dedicates exhibit to camp’s Jewish victims

FRANKFURT, Nov. 10 (JTA) – A exhibit devoted to Jewish Holocaust victims has opened at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin amid concerns that right-wing extremism is growing among German youth. A ceremony dedicating the exhibit on Sunday was one of hundreds of events across Germany that marked Kristallnacht, the nationwide outbreak of Nazi-organized terror against the country’s Jews, Jewish property and synagogues Nov. 9-10, 1938. Commemorations ranged from official events with speeches by state and local politicians to wreath-laying at cemeteries and street demonstrations against racism and anti-Semitism. Speaking at the ceremony at Sachsenhausen, Ignatz Bubis, the leader of Germany’s Jewish community, said he was appalled at the ease with which racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic ideology is spreading nowadays. He told a group of visiting dignitaries, including some 60 survivors of Sachsenhausen, that there are still people who “wish to deny past events and forget what has happened.” The Sachsenhausen barracks that contains the exhibit was destroyed five years ago in an arson attack by an extremist youth. Bubis said 15 percent of younger voters chose right-wing, extremist parties in recent state elections in Hamburg, in northern Germany. “These are signs we should not overlook,” he said. As if to emphasize his point, unknown assailants sprayed paint on five of seven memorial markers at a site in Bavaria, which was formerly a branch of the Dachau concentration camp. Members of a citizens’ association that maintains the memorial called the spraying a “desecration” of the memorial. A spokesman said the group suspects right-wing, extremist assailants were responsible for the attack, especially because of the symbolic nature of the yellow paint used to spray the memorial. Local police, however, said they did not believe the vandalism was meant as a desecration of the memory of concentration camp victims. The Sachsenhausen museum exhibition, meanwhile, presents the history of the concentration camp, focusing on the fates of individual prisoners. Many of the 800 objects displayed were donated by former inmates. Fragments of 500 shoes and other leather goods recently found on the grounds of the camp are also displayed. The exhibition attempts to correct the historical distortions of the previous exhibit, which was assembled before German unification in 1990, when Sachsenhausen was part of communist East Germany. The former exhibition, titled “The History of the Anti-Fascist Resistance Fight and the Suffering of the Jewish People,” emphasized communist resistance against the Nazis and touched only superficially on the Holocaust. Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Avi Primor, who also spoke at the ceremony, commended the willingness of a majority of Germans to speak out against anti-Semitism and racism. Tens of thousands of Germans did just that on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. In the city of Frankfurt an der Oder in eastern Germany, some 3,000 people lit candles and formed a human chain across the German-Polish border crossing. The demonstration was organized by dozens of local political groups, under the motto “Lights Instead of Violence,” to protest repeated attacks by neo-Nazis on foreigners in the city. In the eastern German town of Gollwitz, several hundred people – most of them young – demonstrated against racism. In September, the town council passed a resolution to try to prevent the resettlement of some 50 Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union in their town. The council rescinded the resolution after international protest. At a Kristallnacht commemoration ceremony in Potsdam, the state cultural minister, Steffen Reiche, announced that the city’s rapidly growing Jewish community would soon be given quarters for a synagogue. The previous synagogue was destroyed during World War II.