The responsibility for the Nazi regime's horrors must be borne, without exception, by everyone currently living in Germany, says DW Editor-in-Chief Ines Pohl — and this has nothing to do with individual culpability.
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Image: picture-alliance/dpa/J. Wolf
It has taken a long time for Germany to finally acknowledge that it is a nation of immigration. Many still refuse to recognize that it is not only a cultural enrichment if people from all over the world want to live and work in Germany. Considering demographic developments, the citizens of Europe's largest economic power will not be able to maintain their standard of living without the labor and skills of people from other countries.
A clear commitment
Today, 74 years to the day after the Auschwitz extermination camp was liberated, it is a good day to reflect on what it actually means to immigrate to Germany, to live here or even to aspire to have German citizenship.
It is a good day to consider why the commitment to being a country of immigration includes very clear and immutable rules. And that there is an understanding of ourselves as Germans that must never, ever be up for discussion, where there can be no compromises.
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.
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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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Germany is responsible for the murder of at least 6 million Jews. It is responsible for the death and suffering of millions more people across the European continent and beyond. This part of Germany's history will never be over, must never be forgotten and must live on through remembrance days like today.
But in looking back, we must not get caught in the horrors of the past. Rather, we must look forward and keep asking what we must we do now, today, to do justice to this particular responsibility.
DW Editor-in-Chief Ines PohlImage: DW/P. Böll
It is precisely because the last survivors, but also the last perpetrators, are dying that we must find other ways of making this responsibility accessible to young people, to future voters, to the political decision-makers of the future.
The further Nazi rule fades into the past, the more difficult it is to keep its significance alive in the present. That is just how things are.
It is therefore crucial and appropriate to provide information in schools, to organize school trips to one of the concentration or extermination camps, but also to visit the battlefields of Verdun. It is essential and good that democratic, political forces have joined together across all party lines in order to consistently combat hatred toward Jews and anti-Semitism.
But it is equally as important to make it clear to those whose ancestors did not yet live here during the darkest period of German history, or who are new immigrants, that everyone living in Germany today must be prepared to take on this responsibility. It has nothing to do with individual guilt, but with Germany's national identity. This clarification also belongs to today's commemorations.
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