German lawmakers attend Auschwitz ceremony for Sinti-Roma
August 2, 2024
The Nazis murdered 4,300 Sinti-Roma men, women and children in the gas chambers of Auschwitz on the night of August 2, 1944. Bundestag President Bärbel Bas attended the ceremony to mark 80 years since the genocide.
Senior German and Polish politicians were at the Auschwitz site on Friday for the memorialImage: Jaroslaw Praszkieiwcz/PAP/dpa/picture alliance
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German and other European officials, along with survivors, attended a ceremony on Friday to commemorate the mass murder of thousands of Sinti and Roma people 80 years ago during Germany's Nazi rule.
On the night of August 2, 1944, German guards killed 4,300 men, women and children held at the so-called Gypsy Family Camp at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
The victims were sent to the gas chambers at the camp, located in the then-occupied Polish town of Oswiecim.
In total, 500,000 Sinti and Roma fell victim to the crimes of Nazi Germany.
Genocide 'concealed and denied' even after the war
The head of Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, Bärbel Bas, said Auschwitz still represents "the greatest crime that people have ever committed against people," including Sinti and Roma victims.
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She said it was "a bitter realization" that in post-war Germany, the genocide of the Sinti and Roma was "concealed and denied" and hardly any perpetrators were brought to justice.
Bas said that "hostile attitudes and discrimination against Sinti and Roma are still widespread" as they are discriminated against when looking for housing and jobs and are often distrusted by government agencies.
The German delegation included Manuela Schwesig, state premier of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and the speaker of the Bundesrat upper house of parliament, Culture Minister Claudia Roth and several Bundestag lawmakers.
The speaker of the Bundesrat upper house of parliament, Manuela Schwesig, laid a wreathImage: Lukasz Gagulski/PAP/dpa/picture alliance
Today's 'false prophets' pose similar threat, just as the Nazis did
Several survivors described how they were impacted by the Nazi's policy toward Sinti and Roma people.
"There is hardly a family among us Sinti and Roma that does not associate the name Auschwitz with the murder of their relatives," Holocaust survivor Alma Klasing told the attendees.
She warned that the surge in support for far-right parties across Europe was worrying before asking young people to "defend our democracy" against the threat of "these false prophets."
Auschwitz survivor Marian Turski, who is also president of the International Auschwitz Committee, also alerted in his speech about growing discrimination in European societies.
"It begins with hate speech and it ends with Auschwitz," the 98-year-old said.
Polish Senate President Malgorzata Kidawa-Blonska gave a speech on behalf of her country in front of attendees from Lithuania, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Israel and other countries.
Horrors of the Nazi era in graphic novels
A comic strip from 1944, believed to be the oldest comic about the Holocaust, has been found. Here are other works that deal with the Nazi era.
Image: 2020 Pascal Bresson, Sylvain Dorange, La Boîte à Bulle/Carlsen Verlag GmbH
Building a Nazi submarine bunker
"Valentin," a 2019 graphic novel by Jens Genehr, is based on the diary entries of a French man, Raymond Portefaix, who as a concentration camp inmate was assigned to the construction of the large-scale armaments project. Commissioned by the Nazis, Valentin was a submarine bunker in Bremen. More than 1,000 forced laborers lost their lives during the vessel's construction.
Illustrations of Nazi atrocities from 1944
Dutch historian Kees Ribbens came across the 1944 comic strip "Nazi Death Parade" at a US-based internet shop. The drawings show people in cattle cars, murders in gas chambers disguised as showers and corpses burning in ovens. The drawings are based on eyewitness accounts. According to Ribbens, the comic was part of a campaign pamphlet against the Nazi regime.
Image: Institut zur Erforschung von Krieg, Holocaust und Völkermord/picture alliance
'Maus: A Survivor's Tale'
Art Spiegelman's world-famous comic about the Nazi era was published in 1991. In it, Jews are depicted as mice and Germans as cats. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, the American author tells the story of his father, an Auschwitz survivor, and does not spare the suicide of his mother and the family's tense relationship.
Image: Artie/Jewish Museum New York/picture alliance
The Nazi era from a child's perspective
"When I have nightmares, I tell them to Mom and it's much better afterwards. Do you want to tell me yours?" Elsa asks her grandmother Dounia. Heeding the advice of her granddaughter, Dounia breaks her decades-long silence, telling Elsa what she had to endure as a Jewish girl in France. Loïc Dauvillier's "Hidden: A Child's Story of the Holocaust" (2014) is a touching plea for humanity.
Between Germany and Mallorca
The graphic novel titled "Tante Wussi," or "Aunt Wussi," from 2016 is also semi-autobiographical. Author Katrin Bacher visits her great aunt on the Spanish island of Mallorca and learns the story of her family history. The family moved from Germany but had to leave Spain once the Spanish Civil War broke out. Back in Germany, their Jewish mother and the rest of the family faced persecution.
Husband-and-wife Nazi hunters
France's most famous Nazi hunters, the Klarsfelds, were immortalized in a comic by Pascal Bresson and Sylvain Dorange, first published in French in 2020. Beate Klarsfeld met her future husband Serge, whose father was murdered in Auschwitz, in Paris. They began to track down Nazi war criminals after WWII. In 1968, Beate famously slapped German chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and called him a Nazi.
Image: 2020 Pascal Bresson, Sylvain Dorange, La Boîte à Bulle/Carlsen Verlag GmbH
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Auschwitz played key role in Holocaust
Auschwitz is remembered as one of six major extermination camps set up by the Nazis to round up and kill some 6 million Jews across Europe during World War II. The figure represented around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population at the time.
Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz during the war, 1.1 million were put to death, including 960,000 Jews as well as Roma-Sinti people, Soviet prisoners of war, and gay men.
German parliament honors victims of National Socialism
