Nazi Victims Commemorated in Germany at Sites of Former Camps

Leading Germans, ranging from Hamburg Mayor Herbert Weichmann to H. Woehrle, doputy chairman of the West German Engineers Union pledged in a series of rites yesterday to fight any signs of possible resurgence of Nazism in this country. The ceremonies were held in various places around the country, commemorating the victims of Nazism in observance of the 20th anniversary of the liberation of many concentration camps.

The Hamburg mayor spoke at the site of the former Neuengamme camp, near Hamburg, where 55,000 persons, most of them Jews, were annihilated by the Nazis between 1938 and 1945. In front of many camp survivors from a number of European countries, some of them wearing their old camp uniforms, Mayor Weichmann said his city was determined to “uphold the rule of law.” He appealed for confidence in the “new democratic Germany.” A granite column was unveiled as a monument to the Neuengamme martyrs.

At the former Flossenburg camp, in Bavaria, 2,500 Germans, most of them young people, gathered to honor the memories of the victims who had died there. Prominent actors from the Nuremberg Givic Theater read extracts from testimony given by ex-Nazis at the recently concluded trial of top Auschwitz death camp personnel. Many thousands of others visited the former Dachau concentration camp, also in Bavaria, to see the newly opened museum there which is a shrine to the martyrs who died at Dachau.

Herr Woehrle spoke at rites conducted at Salzgitter, in Lower Saxony, where young German trade unionists laid a wreath honoring the memory of slave workers from many European countries who died while working during the war at the Hermann Goering steel plant. Mr. Woehrle warned that “the continued presence in West German public life of former prominent Nazis is a serious threat to democracy.”