Anti-Semitism has been the subject of intense debate recently in Germany. Do mandatory visits to concentration camp memorial sites help curb the problem? DW's Daniel Bellut joined students on a school trip to find out.
Image: picture-alliance/ZB/B. Settnik
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Ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Saturday, class 10C of Rostock's Don Bosco School is on an obligatory visit to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, just a few kilometers north of Berlin. When the students step off the bus, they seem relaxed and in good spirits. Some of them are happy to not spend the day in a classroom. The history teacher, however, seems a little tense. He obviously wants his students to acknowledge the seriousness of this place.
Tour guide Karl Kröhnke comes to greet the class. He first takes the students on a tour of the concentration camp's exterior grounds and tells them its story. Then, the students approach the gate at the entrance. The closer they get, the more somber the mood becomes — no more laughter, no more teasing. The students stand in front of the gate in silence, concentrating on what Kröhnke is saying.
"Everyone who passed through this gate was no longer a free man," he explains. "On the other side, a life of terror began, a life of total unpredictability."
One student is rather unimpressed. She wonders why life in a concentration camp would be unpredictable if you achieved freedom through hard work. Kröhnke seems to have heard this question before. It is clear to him that her comment reveals an inadequate knowledge of history. Kröhnke answers calmly: "That was pure cynicism! Anyone who worked hard was far from being free."
Imagining the horrors of Nazi Germany
More than 200,000 prisoners were taken to Sachsenhausen during the Nazi era. Homosexuals, Jews, Sinti and Roma, and generally anyone who was not considered to be part of the so-called Aryan race was brought here without a trial. Thousands died — of exhaustion, from medical experiments or in executions.
As the tour continues, the students walk past the narrow barracks in which the prisoners were housed. Kröhnke explains how guards, armed with machine guns, were able to see everything in the camp from their watchtowers. We see the execution site where more than 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war were murdered. Then we see the ovens in which the bodies were burned afterwards.
"I am completely shocked and can hardly believe what happened here," says a girl with a sad look on her face after she steps out of a barracks. "You have to see this, after all, it's part of German history," another boy adds.
Increased anti-Semitism in Germany?
The school visit to the concentration camp aims to sensitize the students to the crimes committed during the Nazi era. It is a lesson being taught at a time when anti-Semitism has returned to the forefront of the public discourse in Germany. In December 2017, demonstrators near the Brandenburg Gate burned Israeli flags at a protest against the US decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Anti-Semitic slurs were reportedly yelled. These scenes were reminiscent of a dark chapter in German history. Amid fears of rising anti-Semitism in the country, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, said students and asylum seekers should be required to visit a concentration camp.
People cannot be forced to be compassionate
A visit to the concentration camp is already mandatory for the students of class 10C from Rostock. Their teacher Robert Arndt, however, does not see this as a forced lesson.
"Obviously remembrance culture shouldn't be forced because then the students shut themselves off," he says. "One must, of course, find a way to approach this difficult subject."
Before they leave, his students lay down a wreath and yellow roses to pay tribute to those who were murdered. The visit may have been part of the curriculum, but the teenagers' compassion seems natural and genuine.
'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.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
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.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
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.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
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.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
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.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
'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.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
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.
