East Germany donated hundreds of artifacts to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Tuesday, ranging from Nazi euthanasia instruments to an IBM machine used by Nazis to register Jews.
Gerhard Herder, the East German ambassador to the United States, made the presentation at the museum’s office here to Miles Lerman, chairman of the museum’s international relations committee.
The presentation, said Herder, “underlines that my government is serious in stating that the entire German people has a responsibility for the past. That is why the negotiations with Jewish organizations to provide material support to those who became victims of the Holocaust in the years from 1933 to 1945 will be continued.”
The one other Eastern European country that has contributed artifacts to the museum is Poland, which contributed barracks from the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps as well as a railway car used to transport Jews.
In addition, the museum has received archival material from East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Soviet Union.
The Nazi euthanasia program killed roughly 500,000 Germans and set a precedent for the mass killings of the Holocaust.
The registration machine, an IBM Hollerith punch card tabulating and sorting machine, was originally developed in the United States for the census of 1890.
In 1933, 1935 and 1939, the Third Reich used the machine to conduct national censuses, which provided a vital link in the chain of identifying Jews, Gypsies and other ethnic groups.
ROCKET PARTS BUILT FROM SLAVE LABOR
East Germany also presented V-2 rocket parts made by slave laborers. More than 10,000 of the 60,000 slave laborers died in the Holocaust, some killed by the SS, others dying from the grim conditions in the underground tunnels.
In addition, the museum received portions of tree trunks inscribed with messages from prisoners of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
The messages were carved by Jews, political prisoners and Soviet prisoners of war in a forest as British and Soviet forces closed in on the camp in 1945. Thousands of prisoners had been marching from the camp when the convoy halted for some days in a forest, where they ate tree bark to stay alive.
The Holocaust museum, which is under construction here on a federal site near the Washington Monument, is scheduled to open in the spring of 1993.
Meanwhile, Sam Eskenazi, spokesman for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, which oversees the $147 million project, rejected a call by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen for the museum to be moved to Berlin.
“If there is to be one major museum, if $147 million is to be spent somewhere, then it ought to be where the Holocaust originated: Germany,” Cohen wrote Wednesday.
“The museum belongs at the site of the crime — a gift from America, particularly American Jews, to the German nation,” Cohen asserted.
But Eskenazi responded that “our museum is not going to move anywhere, of course.”
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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.
