Germany must not neglect its terrible past

Rabbi William Wolff

There is little will to mark the many sites of Nazi crime — or to preserve their bleak lessons

THE Nazi prisoner of war camp of Sandbostel, which housed Royal and Merchant Navy men, has been granted a sudden halt on its long march to oblivion. Sandbostel, known as Stalag XB, stands on the swampy plains of North Germany between the ports of Bremen and Hamburg. It was unique in that it was possibly the only prisoner of war camp that doubled as a concentration and extermination camp.

Sandbostel locked away more than a million men and women during the Second World War, and it has a strong British connection. It housed British naval prisoners in the early years of the war — on January 1, l942, they totalled 2,483. The Grenadier Guards liberated it on April 29, l945, just two weeks after driving the Nazis out of nearby Belsen. They found 3,000 unburied corpses decaying amid the diseased and dying inmates, and dubbed it “a minor Belsen”. Once the prisoners had been evacuated, the British Army of the Rhine turned it into a re-education camp for SS and Nazi personnel, and so kept it going for another three years until l948.

The British naval men were followed at Sandbostel by thousands of Soviet prisoners of war. The Nazis had no compunction about defying the Geneva Convention and murdering these by the thousands. In the last months of the war, it also acted as a killing camp for prisoners driven out of other concentration camps, especially the notorious Neuengamme near Hamburg, as Allied armies closed in. A Soviet memorial on the site was blown up by the local authority in l956 because, it alleged, the figures on it were grossly exaggerated. Four years later the site was made into an industrial development area.

For 60 years Sandbostel has also been a symbol of the yet-unresolved German struggle between remembering and obliterating the past. Equally unresolved is the question of who pays for its upkeep. After a 13-year battle, a local pressure group has now acquired part of Sandbostel to turn it into a memorial site. Six of the original barracks are still standing, although Klaus Volland, a local history teacher and leading member of the foundation which has acquired the site, insists that they are in imminent danger of collapse. The foundation desperately needs €250,000 for instant restoration work. “We are looking for sponsors,” says Dr Volland. So far not one is in sight. Even so, Sandbostel now has a glimmer of a chance. Its prospects are rather better than the castle of Lichtenburg, for example, which dominates the town of Prettin, on the river Elbe, an hour or two by car from Martin Luther’s Wittenberg. This was one of the Nazis’ first concentration camps, a test bed for later death camps and the first exclusively reserved for women.

Lichtenburg was also the camp in which the Social Democrat leader, Ernst Reuter, a significant postwar mayor of Berlin, was held. It has now been closed because the local council insists it can no longer scrape together the two or three million euros needed for urgent repair work, nor the annual running costs of up to €300,000. “It is unique, of supreme historical importance,” insists Wolfgang Benz, an historian at the Technical University in Berlin and director of its Centre for Antisemitism Research. This fact has not been able to entice either the regional nor the federal government, or any private foundation, to step in with the necessary funds. Lichtenburg may now go the way of Kaufering, near Landsberg in Bavaria, a complex of 12 concentration and slave labour camps which housed 30,000 prisoners. Not even a plaque remembers them. Benz reveals that there are hundreds of camps like this all over Germany, with neither plate nor pillar to mark their past. The little known fact is that there were more than 1,000 Nazi labour, death and concentration camps. They stretched across Europe from the Channel Island of Alderney to the Ukraine. Twenty-two were main camps and remain well known, like Dachau (the first to be set up in l933), Buchenwald, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbrück. Some, like Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Chelmno in Poland and Ukraine, had not one barrack because prisoners were stripped on arrival and hounded straight into gas chambers. None survived more than six hours at these camps.

Each camp had satellites. Berlin alone had 30 to 40 satellite camps. About 200 of these have now vanished without trace. They are now farms, woods, factories or trading estates; lost to history. Lost with them are the lessons their history had to teach. Neither monuments, like the new European holocaust monument near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, nor museums are a substitute for the actual sites, protests Benz. “A museum does not hurt,” he insists. “A site can move to tears and leave a lasting mark on the human soul.” With Barbara Distel, the director of the memorial site at Dachau, he has now set out to remedy this with a seven- volume history of the concentration camps. Under the title Der Ort des Terrors (The Place of Terror) they will list and describe every one. The first and second volumes are now in the bookshops, and the remaining five are due to be completed over the next three years.

To comply with German bureaucracy, they had to classify their project as “cultural” rather than historic or scientific. In this way they were able to prise some €60,000 a year out of the education department of the Berlin Government, and the German Foreign Ministry has chipped in twice with another €30,000 for translation costs. But books, like monuments and museums, lack the emotional impact of huts, graves or the desolate mountain of shoes still lying behind glass in Auschwitz. And because German regional and local governments plead poverty, only federal funds can now preserve those from oblivion, and such projects are unlikely to be a priority with Angela Merkel’s coalition, now in power in Berlin.

As an East German, Merkel, from personal experience, will know more about persecution than Gerhard Schröder or any other predecessor. We can only hope that she will not want to compound the pain of Germany’s past with the shame of consigning it to oblivion.

William Wolff is area rabbi for northeastern Germany, based in Schwerin