Recent events at Sachsenhausen have caused controversy: first visits from defiant AfD lawmakers, and now a scandal regarding security guards. It could be due to the current social climate, says a director for the site.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/S. Kembowski
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Can a company owned by a suspected right-wing extremist really be guarding the Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial site? That was the claim made by the German daily Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung earlier this week. Since then, the case has been making waves. Axel Drecoll, the director of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation is alarmed. In an interview with DW, he described the incident as "wholly unacceptable," not least because the company concerned was employed without the foundation's knowledge.
Since February last year, City Control Gebäude- und Sicherheitsservice (Building and Security Service) has been responsible for security at Sachsenhausen. However, the company, which is based on the outskirts of Berlin, employed a firm from Cottbus as a subcontractor — without obtaining the written permission of the memorial site, as it was contractually obliged to do.
Drecoll says the incident will now be "very carefully examined." City Control may lose the whole security contract. The collaboration with the external company — which DW has been told is taking legal action to defend itself against the allegations — was terminated immediately, at the memorial site's insistence.
Concentration camp survivors, relatives appalled
City Control is conscious of the shocking nature of the incident. DW has seen the company's detailed statement, which refers to "misconduct by one individual" — not someone in its own ranks, it says, but someone working for the subcontractor. The statement goes on to admit that this has cast an "extremely bad light" on the subcontractor, on City Control, and "most especially on our clients" — in this instance, the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation, which is worried about its reputation.
Reports about dubious security companies and about visits to Sachsenhausen by right-wing extremists have horrified concentration camp survivors and their relatives. For example, a group from the constituency of Alice Weidel, a member of the German Bundestag who is the parliamentary party leader for the AfD (Alternative for Germany), paid a visit in July 2018. The members of the group are said to have made light of Nazi crimes and cast doubt on the existence of gas chambers in the extermination camps.
'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is January 27. Numerous memorials across Germany ensure the millions of victims are not forgotten.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/M. Schreiber
Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site
A large sculpture stands in front of Dachau. Located just outside Munich, it was the first concentration camp opened by the Nazi regime. Just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power, it was used by the paramilitary SS Schutzstaffel to imprison, torture and kill political opponents of the regime. Dachau also served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi camps that followed.
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Wannsee House
The villa on Berlin's Wannsee lake was pivotal in the planning of the Holocaust. Fifteen members of the Nazi government and the SS Schutzstaffel met here on January 20, 1942 to devise what became known as the "Final Solution," the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory. In 1992, the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held was turned into a memorial and museum.
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Holocaust Memorial in Berlin
Located next to the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated 60 years after the end of World War II on May 10, 2005, and opened to the public two days later. Architect Peter Eisenman created a field with 2,711 concrete slabs. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims.
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Memorial to Persecuted Homosexuals
Not too far from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, another concrete memorial honors the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The 4-meter high (13-foot) monument, which has a window showing alternately a film of two men or two women kissing, was inaugurated in Berlin's Tiergarten on May 27, 2008.
Image: picture alliance/Markus C. Hurek
Documentation center on Nazi Party rally grounds
Nuremberg hosted the biggest Nazi party propaganda rallies from 1933 until the start of World War II. The annual Nazi Party congress, as well as rallies with as many as 200,000 participants, took place on the 11-square-kilometer (4.25-square-mile) area. Today, the unfinished Congress Hall building serves as a documentation center and a museum.
Image: picture-alliance/Daniel Karmann
German Resistance Memorial Center
The Bendlerblock building in Berlin was the headquarters of a military resistance group. On July 20, 1944, a group of Wehrmacht officers around Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg carried out an assassination attempt on Hitler that ultimately failed. The leaders of the conspiracy were summarily shot the same night in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock. Today, it's the German Resistance Memorial Center.
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Bergen-Belsen Memorial
The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony was initially established as a prisoner of war camp before becoming a concentration camp. Prisoners too sick to work were brought here from other concentration camps, and many also died of disease. One of the 50,000 people killed here was Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who gained international fame after her diary was published posthumously.
Image: picture alliance/Klaus Nowottnick
Buchenwald Memorial
Located near the Thuringian town of Weimar, Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. From 1937 to April 1945, the National Socialists deported about 270,000 people from all over Europe to the camp and murdered 64,000 of them before the camp was liberated by US soldiers in 1945. The site now serves as a memorial to the victims.
Image: Getty Images/J. Schlueter
Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims
Opposite the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, a park inaugurated in 2012 serves as a memorial to the 500,000 Sinti and Roma people killed by the Nazi regime. Around a memorial pool, the poem "Auschwitz" by Roma poet Santino Spinelli is written in English, Germany and Romani. "Gaunt face, dead eyes, cold lips, quiet, a broken heart, out of breath, without words, no tears," it reads.
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'Stolpersteine' — stumbling blocks as memorials
In the 1990s, artist Gunter Demnig began the project to confront Germany's Nazi past. The brass-covered concrete cubes placed in front of the former homes of Nazi victims show their names, details about their deportation, and murder, if known. As of early 2022, some 100,000 "Stolpersteine" have been laid in over 25 countries across Europe. It's the world's largest decentralized Holocaust memorial.
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Brown House in Munich
Right next to the "Führerbau," where Adolf Hitler had his office in Munich, was the headquarters of the Nazi Party, called the Brown House. A white cube now occupies the place where it once stood. In it, the "Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism" opened on April 30, 2015, 70 years after the defeat of the Nazi regime.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/Sven Hoppe
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'Language is shifting'
"The other thing, of course, is the social climate," says Drecoll. The director of the memorial site is also a historian. He says that for quite a while now he has been conscious of the fact that public communication has changed. New possibilities exist, he says, for "expressing racist views, holding forth in favor of exaggerated nationalism, expressing anti-Semitic views." He has also noted that "the language is shifting" in the parliamentary realm. He is gravely concerned about this development, which he considers dangerous.
However, at the same time, Drecoll, who has been in this post since June 2018, fears that the media and the public may have a skewed perception of things. Of course, they are taking what has been happening in Sachsenhausen "very, very seriously" — nonetheless, he is at pains to point out that these incidents are rare. He points out that the foundation's memorial sites had a total of 850,000 visitors, 700,000 of whom came to the former concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. The vast majority, he says, came to learn about and come to terms with its history.
Neo-Nazis at Obersalzberg
Drecoll also had similar experiences at the Obersalzberg documentation center, which he headed before moving to the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation. People would come and visit the site of Adolf Hitler's retreat in the idyllic Bavarian mountains near Berchtesgaden, and some "not only had an uncritical attitude to the Nazi regime, but were even, to some extent, still pursuing its aims."
It seems that neo-Nazis find carefully staged idealistic imagery — the "Führer" with his German shepherd, for example — particularly attractive. Drecoll observed an increase in the number of unwanted guests like these during his time at Obersalzberg. However, there too, he says, they only constituted a "tiny proportion" of the visitors.
