Deputy Prime Minister Alois Hundhammer of Bavaria, himself a survivor of the Dachau concentration camp, used the occasion of the dedication yesterday of a memorial to the Jews who perished there during the Nazi regime to warn the West German Government and democratic elements in the country against the dangers of a radical rightwing revival.
The Bavarian official, accompanied by other state and federal officials, joined the thousands of Jews and non-Jews who assembled at the site of the camp, on the outskirts of Munich, to dedicate the memorial. Many of the participants had been inmates of the camp — the first set up by the Nazi regime for political offenders. The memorial is a simple stark vault of rough stone. A Menorah projects from its sharply peaked roof. A Protestant and a Catholic memorial had previously been erected at the camp, most of which has been razed except for the crematory building which has been kept as a museum.
At the new memorial, after the Jews, some of them in Dachau prison garb, had recited prayers for the dead, representatives of German youth organizations, and Catholic priests deposited memorial wreaths, as did representatives of an Israeli student group. Ambassador Asher Ben-Nathan of Israel, a speaker at the ceremony, said that the Dachau camp had been “a school for murderers who learned there their bloody trade which they later put to practice elsewhere.”
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