Educating against anti-Semitism: German students visit concentration camp | Germany| News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW | 26.01.2018

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Educating against anti-Semitism: German students visit concentration camp

Anti-Semitism has been the subject of intense debate recently in Germany. Do mandatory visits to concentration camp memorial sites help curb the problem? DW's Daniel Bellut joined students on a school trip to find out.

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German students visit Sachsenhausen

Ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Saturday, class 10C of Rostock's Don Bosco School is on an obligatory visit to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, just a few kilometers north of Berlin. When the students step off the bus, they seem relaxed and in good spirits. Some of them are happy to not spend the day in a classroom. The history teacher, however, seems a little tense. He obviously wants his students to acknowledge the seriousness of this place.

Tour guide Karl Kröhnke comes to greet the class. He first takes the students on a tour of the concentration camp's exterior grounds and tells them its story. Then, the students approach the gate at the entrance. The closer they get, the more somber the mood becomes — no more laughter, no more teasing. The students stand in front of the gate in silence, concentrating on what Kröhnke is saying.

"Everyone who passed through this gate was no longer a free man," he explains. "On the other side, a life of terror began, a life of total unpredictability."

One student is rather unimpressed. She wonders why life in a concentration camp would be unpredictable if you achieved freedom through hard work. Kröhnke seems to have heard this question before. It is clear to him that her comment reveals an inadequate knowledge of history. Kröhnke answers calmly: "That was pure cynicism! Anyone who worked hard was far from being free."

Imagining the horrors of Nazi Germany

More than 200,000 prisoners were taken to Sachsenhausen during the Nazi era. Homosexuals, Jews, Sinti and Roma, and generally anyone who was not considered to be part of the so-called Aryan race was brought here without a trial. Thousands died — of exhaustion, from medical experiments or in executions.

As the tour continues, the students walk past the narrow barracks in which the prisoners were housed. Kröhnke explains how guards, armed with machine guns, were able to see everything in the camp from their watchtowers. We see the execution site where more than 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war were murdered. Then we see the ovens in which the bodies were burned afterwards.

"I am completely shocked and can hardly believe what happened here," says a girl with a sad look on her face after she steps out of a barracks. "You have to see this, after all, it's part of German history," another boy adds.

Increased anti-Semitism in Germany?

The school visit to the concentration camp aims to sensitize the students to the crimes committed during the Nazi era. It is a lesson being taught at a time when anti-Semitism has returned to the forefront of the public discourse in Germany. In December 2017, demonstrators near the Brandenburg Gate burned Israeli flags at a protest against the US decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Anti-Semitic slurs were reportedly yelled. These scenes were reminiscent of a dark chapter in German history. Amid fears of rising anti-Semitism in the country, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, said students and asylum seekers should be required to visit a concentration camp.

People cannot be forced to be compassionate

A visit to the concentration camp is already mandatory for the students of class 10C from Rostock. Their teacher Robert Arndt, however, does not see this as a forced lesson.

"Obviously remembrance culture shouldn't be forced because then the students shut themselves off," he says. "One must, of course, find a way to approach this difficult subject."

Before they leave, his students lay down a wreath and yellow roses to pay tribute to those who were murdered. The visit may have been part of the curriculum, but the teenagers' compassion seems natural and genuine.

  • Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz in Berlin

    '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.

  • Skulptur über der Außenmauer der KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau

    '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.

  • Kongresshalle auf dem ehemaligen Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nürnberg

    '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.

  • Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen

    '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.

  • Bendlerblock - Ehrenhof der Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand

    '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.

  • Gedenkstätte Hadamar

    '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.

  • Holocaust Denkmal Berlin

    '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.

  • Gedenkstätte für die im Nationalsozialismus verfolgten Homosexuellen Berlin

    '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.

  • Gedenkstätte für die im Nationalsozialismus ermordeten Sinti und Roma Berlin

    '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."

  • Stolperstein in Hamburg

    '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.

  • Der ehemalige Führerbau

    '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.

    Author: Max Zander, Ille Simon


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