The Bavarian prime minister, who refused to take part in a mass demonstration against neo-Nazis in Berlin on Sunday, has promised representatives from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council that he is, nevertheless, determined to fight right-wing extremists.
In an official ceremony in Munich on Saturday, Max Streibel also promised Miles Lerman, chairman of the council’s Committee for International Affairs, that he will pay an official visit to the site of the Dachau concentration camp.
In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Lerman said he had complained to Streibel that Bavarian authorities inadequately support the museum at Dachau.
Lerman reminded Streibel of the recent desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Munich. He said that if German citizens do not vehemently defend their democracy from right-wing extremists, “racism will spread like the plague.”
In a speech at the Berlin Jewish Community Center to commemorate the 54th anniversary of Kristallnacht, Lerman said American Jews are worried about the recent racist attacks against foreigners in Germany, which are perpetrated “as if they were attacking Jews.”
He called on all German towns to organize mass demonstrations like that which draw some 350,000 people in Berlin, “as this is the only answer for hooligans and neo-Nazis, and proof that Germany will not degenerate to racism and hatred.”
Lerman is leading a 35-member delegation on a 10-day visit to Germany that included a visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp on the Kristallnacht anniversary. The delegation includes Holocaust survivors and the liberators of the camp, members of an all-black former U.S. Army regiment.
The delegates on the trip are collecting soil from concentration camps and World War II battlefields in Germany, Holland, Belgium and France. The soil will be placed in the Hall of Remembrance in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which is scheduled to open officially in April 1993.
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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.
