'Never Again!': Holocaust remembrance under pressure
Young people have been photographed giving Nazi salutes inside Buchenwald concentration camp crematorium, with the director of the memorial foundation warning that Holocaust remembrance is under increasing attack.
Young people pose inside a crematorium oven at the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial, laughing while they give the Nazi salute and take pictures of each other. "In a sense, they're trophies to post on social media for them to boast about — breaking the ultimate taboo," Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, told DW.
"Incidents like this have become more frequent in recent years. We have seen memorial trees planted in honor of concentration camp victims cut down. When something like this happens — and it happens regularly — I find it particularly despicable because, because it ultimately kills these people a second time," added Wagner.
Memory under attack
Wagner is part of the curatorial team behind the exhibition "Never Again! Against Forgetting the Crimes of the Nazi Regime" in Bonn's Bundeskunsthalle. He warns that Holocaust remembrance is under pressure and the subject of intensifying attacks.
Critics have dismissed remembrance as a "cult of guilt" or "national masochism." With right-wing populism on the rise and historical revisionism becoming more common, Wagner worries about how Germany will remember the victims murdered by the Nazi regime. He is also concerned about the future of democracy.
For the longest time, people have been discussing migration almost exclusively in terms of threats to public safety and crime. This broadly marginalizes certain groups — a mechanism that also worked for National Socialism.
Survivor's perspective
Eva Umlauf, now 83, is a patron of the Bonn exhibition. As a two-year-old, she was deported with her family from the Novaky labor camp in Slovakia to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was saved from the gas chambers by mere days; the Nazis stopped using them as the Red Army advanced.
Her father, mother's siblings and grandparents were all murdered. Eva barely survived herself, suffering from tuberculosis, rickets and whooping cough. "I cannot forgive," she says. "How can you forgive the deaths of 6 million people?"
Rising challenges
Umlauf is appalled by the disrespectful behavior of young people at former concentration camps and by growing ignorance about the Holocaust. "I go into schools. I'm so overwhelmed by the number of requests asking for my availability. And yet, the AfD is growing faster than I can reach students," she told DW.
Germany must never again fall under a right-wing dictatorship, she stresses. "'Never again' sounds nice, but all I can say is: It's happening again!" The exhibition "Never Again! Against Forgetting the Crimes of the Nazi Regime" in the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn runs through May 2, 2027.
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