Of the 15 monuments erected by East Germany to commemorate the thousands of victims of Buchenwald, until this week, none acknowledged anti-Semitism.
A monument to commemorate the tens of thousands of Jews who were murdered by the Nazis in the concentration camp in the former East Germany was unveiled at the site Wednesday.
The new memorial should also serve as a warning to combat rising racist and anti-Semitic movements in Germany today, said speakers at the ceremony.
“Unfortunately, it seems lately as if the young generation in Germany has not learned from the past,” said Munich’s chief rabbi, Yitzhak Ehrenberg. “I hope that these youngsters will be brought here to be told of the past, so that it never returns.”
The federal minister for family and senior citizens, Hannelore Ronsch, attacked attempts to play down the Holocaust in Germany.
“We must face our history and feel responsible for it,” she said.
Ronsch added that Germany of today is not the Weimar Republic, because most citizens now reject violence.
“We will not surrender to violence,” she said.
The unveiling coincided with the 55th anniversary of Kristallnacht and the deportation of some 10,000 German and Austrian Jews who were brought to Buchenwald during the night of Nov. 9-10, 1938.
A plaque about the deportation had served as the camp’s sole reference to Jews, despite the fact that Jews comprised the largest number of the camp’s 56,549 victims.
The former East Germany “didn’t recognize the Jews as a nationality — only as a religion,” said John Ranz of New York, chairman of Survivors of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
“No Jewish monument was built there because we were classified as members of those nationalities from where we came,” he said.
‘I STILL RECALL THE VISIONS OF HORROR’
The absence of a public tribute to the Jewish victims of Buchenwald went largely unknown until March 1989, when The New York Times reported that East Germany’s memorial at the site “does not commemorate the victims for what they were, and it denies to the United States recognition for having liberated Buchenwald.”
The camp, in the northeast German state of Thuringia, was liberated by the 4th Armored Division of Gen. George Patton’s 3rd U.S. Army on April 11, 1945.
Of the 2,000 Jews who survi###ed the camp, 1,000 were children, saved by the U.S. armed forces and prisoners in an underground organization at the camp, Ranz said.
The children’s survival, he said, “was the largest treasure of the European Jewish community after the Holocaust.”
Among the children saved were Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel; Yisrael Meir Lau, now the chief Ashkenazic rabbi of Israel; and his brother, Naphtali Lavie, a former Israeli consul general to New York.
“I still recall the visions of horror in this inferno,” Lavie said Wednesday at the ceremony. “I still see before me friends being carried to the crematorium.”
Until now, the camp, which was marked by some 15 different commemorative plaques, bore no plaques mentioning anti-Semitism. Instead, the Killers were labeled as fascists and their victims as anti-fascists.
By official East German standards, Jews were not considered a separate people, let alone a nation. Yet the camp even bore a plaque commemorating “victims of Arab states,” although there was no Arab deportation to that or any other concentration camp.
Jewish suffering continued in Buchenwald after its liberation, Lavie said.
“Less than one month after liberation, a provisional monument was erected,” recalling the victims and their nationalities” he said.
“Jews were not mentioned and we stood there, hurt and insulted, listening to the speeches praising Stalin for liberating us.
“At the end of the ceremony one of us, Shalom Tepper, added with a brush the word ‘Jews’ on the monument,” Lavie said. “The crowd beat him down for his ‘crime.'”
Tepper died three years later in Israel’s War of Independence.
After the Times article appeared, the Workmen’s Circle, a fraternal Jewish socialist organization, lodged an immediate protest with the then East German government, asking for “immediate rectification” of the matter.
The matter was rectified following constant insistence from a group of Jewish survivors of the camp.
‘FOR THE MEMORY OF THOSE WHO DIED’
After the reunification of Germany in October 1990, Buchenwald survivors from the United States, France, Israel and Germany repeatedly pressed the government of Thuringia to erect a monument to the camp’s Jewish victims.
Before he left for Germany last week, Ranz, whose organization was instrumental in the effort to erect a plaque, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Our work is in the struggle against Nazism and anti-Semitism, to help create a better world.
“This is a legacy we promised a week after liberation, April 18, 1945,” he said.
“We insisted on building a monument. We feel it’s an achievement for the memory of those who died in Buchenwald and in the Holocaust,” said Ranz.
For Ranz, a survivor from Poland, this was his first return to Germany since Buchenwald’s liberation. “This event forces me and others to go back and honor those who didn’t survive.” he said.
Under a gray sky and a chilling wind, he was among several hundred people gathered by the memorial, a ditch nearly 400 feet long.
One side of the ditch is a concrete wall into which pieces of olive wood were mixed.
“The wood symbolizes hope and love,” said the architect, Klaus Schlosser.
Around the ditch, concrete letters in German, Hebrew and English offer a message from Psalm 83:
“So that the generation to come might know, the children, yet to be born, that they too may rise and declare to their children.”
(Contributing to this report was JTA staff intern Michele Berman in New York.)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
