Lest We Forget: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Grafeneck (Satis Shroff)

Lest We Forget: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Grafeneck (Satis Shroff)

The 27th of January 1945 is an important day in the annals of German history, for it was the day when the Jewish, disabled and Roma gypsies of the German society were freed from the concentration camp of Auschwitz.

This memorable day has been celebrated since then every year. This year the historian Pavel Polian has been invited to hold a talk at the Emperor’s Hall (Kaisersaal) of the Historical Kaufhaus at the Münsterplatz in Freiburg. Polian is a member of the Jewish community in Freiburg and will be talking about the fate of the Jews during the World War II. He will be commenting on a film interview with Andreas Meckel.

It might be mentioned that the 9th of November is also a memorial day to think about the victims of the Reichsprogrom night in the year 1938. At the memorial in the former Synagogue it has become a tradition for the Cultural Mayor to give a speech, along with members of the evangelical community, a rabbi and a cantor.

Last year Professor Heinrich Schwendemann spoke on the theme ‘Das Jahr 1938: Radikalisierung der national-sozialistischen Judenverfolgung.’ At the Albert Ludwig’s university of Freiburg Professor Miriam Schambeck spoke about ‚Auschwitz can’t be thought about, Auschwitz has to be remembered: Challenges and Principles of Holocaust Education in the religion-pedagogic context.’

November 9, 1938 marked the change from latent anti-Semitism to open aggression on the Jews in Germany. For many towns and communities this day is remembered as the dark side of German history. The assassination of the German Sceretary Ernst von Rath in the Parisian Embassy by the Polish Jew Herschel Grünspan was used by the then Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, as an excuse to carry out a Reich Progrome throughout the country. In the wee morning hours of November 10, 1938 the synagogue in Freiburg was set on fire and many Jewish shops were demolished by the SS and SA-men.

An interesting lecture was given by the social scientist Heiko Wegmann on the little-known SS-standard leader Walter Gunst (1900-1943) who master-minded and ran the Progrom in Freiburg. He was a leading personality of the NS-aggression in Freiburg. Mr. Wegmann made an important local contribution towards research on one of the perpetrators of the Third Reich.  In his lecture he sketched the organisation of the south-badische SS, the military and antisemetic propaganda work, and the cooperation with other NS-organisations. Walter Gunst was one of the many persons who misused their positions to make themselves rich. Gunst was very fond of alcohol and rather corrupt, and as a result attempts were made to remove him from his job. Although he was a Nazi he fell in love with a Polish woman, and when his superiors got wind of it, he was degraded and sent to the warfront and was declared as missing since 1943. (Walter Gunst, Führer der Standarte Schwarzwald, brauner Bonze und Synagoguen-Brandstifter).

In this connexion the psychiatric clinique of the Freiburger University under its first director Alfred Hoche played a nefarious role, for it was Hoche who published in 1920, together with the lawyer Karl Binding, a book with the title ‘Die Freigabe der Vernichtung unwerten Lebens,’ a book about worthless lives that were given free to be exterminated. It is in this work that definitions and words were coined and constructed which were later implemented by the Nazis to justify the mass-murders of physically and mentally handicapped and disabled people by using Zyklon B to gas them.

The Stuttgarter House of History drew 150 000 visitors and this year’s theme is ‘Zwangsarbeit,’ that is, forced labour in the National Socialist times. The visitors are given the opportunity to try out dried bread similar to those days baked according to a World War I recipe, and the visitors are expected to use their sensory organs to discover how the people live lived in the south-west during the World War I. There’s even a reconstructed hut where the sentenced convicts lived and visitors are expected to try these out to have an idea of being a prisoner in the Nazi times in an outdoor museum in Wackershofen in Schwäbish Hall. There’s also an exhibition for the visitors.

A baroque castle in Swabian Alb was the first gas-chamber for the industrially organised mass-murders of the nazis. The fact that 10 654 people were murdered by the nazis was well known among the people of Baden-Württemberg. This heinous act went under the the name of euthanasia. When it comes to mass-murders you automatically think of Auschwitz and Treblinka, but certainly not Grafeneck. But that’s exactly where such crimes were committed. The families of the victims didn’t talk about due to shame or angst. For the  grandchildren this taboo theme is interesting, as the children have history in their curriculums, and are well informed about the dark side of the Third Reich, which is indeed a good thing. A good many books written by the current generation have been published along the lines of ‘Grandpa, what did you do during the last World War? German school classes visit the former concentration camps and are speechless, cry and later discuss about Auschwitz, Gurs and Treblinka. The current generation is also well travelled and are well-informed, thanks to the mobile and iPads and what-have-yous.

Recently, a friend of mine said he’d discovered that his oh-so-good family-friendly Dad was a Nazi officer. He found it hard to swallow but he knows a lot about his dead father now that the taboo has been broken. I encouraged him to keep at it till he knew everything to find, what we call in German, his Seelenfrieden. Peace of the soul.