German Jews Mark Allied Liberation of Nazi Camp Survivors

Solemn memorial services today in various parts of Germany marked the ninth anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps which fell into the hands of victorious Allied troops on V-E Day in 1945.

At the towering shaft of the Bergen-Belsen memorial, a group of Jews from Hamburg, Hanover and other cities, assembled to bow their heads and hear prayers by two rabbis–Dr. Paul Holzer, chief Jewish clergyman of the British zone, and Dr. Azariah-Helfgott, a former camp inmate now attached to the Israel Purchasing Mission at Cologne.

In this city, the Association of Jewish Communities in Northwest Germany marked the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising at a concert at which Richard Beer-Hofmann’s “The Dream of Jacob” was performed.

(In a message sent from London to the Association of Jewish Communities of Northwest Germany, Dr. Noah Barou, chairman of the European executive of the World Jewish Congress, and A. L. Easterman, WJC political director, declared that the fate of countless innocent victims of Nazi barbarity “should serve as a warning against the danger of policies of encouraging Nazi criminals, ” and called for the rehabilitation of concentration camp survivors as one of the “foremost obligations of our generation.”)

At Weimar and Buchenwald–in East Germany–ceremonies today marked the end of a four-day memorial rally. Delegates from 16 countries gathered at the site of the notorious Buchenwald camp and recited in unison the “Buchenwald Oath. ” On the camp’s old Nazi roll-call square, an assembly was convoked. A special Catholic mass was recited by a French priest, and a German clergyman conducted Protestant rites. There was no Jewish religious ceremony.