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COVER STORY:
Germans and the Holocaust
October 7, 2005    Episode no. 906
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BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a troubling report today on the revival of anti-Semitism in Germany. After 60 years of remembering the horror of the Nazi Holocaust, of creating memorials to the Jews who died, and of paying reparations to Israel, some Germans, some of them neo-Nazis, are saying, "Enough apologizing." Bob Faw of NBC News has the story.

BOB FAW: Here, where thousands of prisoners were greeted by the sadistic sign "Work Shall Make You Free," only to be put to death later by Hitler's SS, here on a lovely Sunday afternoon, mechanic Hans Peter Otto is bringing his wife and three small children not to a soccer game or picnic but to Sachsenhausen, a Nazi concentration camp outside Berlin.

HANS PETER OTTO (Mechanic) (Through Translator): It's very important to keep places like that as a place of remembrance, so things like that will never happen again.

FAW: Even old German soldiers like Holst Starosske, 78, can only look on now in disbelief.

Photo of HOLST STAROSSKE HOLST STAROSSKE (War Veteran) (Through Translator): I repeatedly come here to look at all the crime that was committed here, because during the war we didn't notice any of it. And only after the war we found out, through places like this.

FAW: In the Holocaust, Hitler's diabolical scheme to exterminate all the Jews in Europe, 6 million died. But Inge Deutschkron, now 83, survived. While Jews all around her were rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps, she was given a job and refuge in this shop, now a museum, where German businessman Otto Weidt produced brushes.

INGE DEUTSCHKRON (Museum Blindenwerkstatt): He was not Jewish. He risked his head, there's no question about it.

FAW: Deutschkron left Germany, returned, and now teaches children here what Hitler did to Jews and how non-Jews like Otto Weidt tried to help. But for years in Germany there was mostly silence about atrocities of the Hitler era. That's changed. That history is taught now in all German schools. And all over the country, Holocaust victims are remembered -- here at the Jewish cemetery of Berlin, one of Europe's largest.

Photo of gravestone (Voice of Translator, Reading Inscription on Gravestone): Both died in a concentration camp of Auschwitz. Only God knows why.

FAW: Remembered, too, at this memorial -- a train depot, now abandoned, in Berlin.

(Voice of Translator, Reading Plaque at Train Depot): In memory of tens of thousands deported to the death camps and killed by the Nazi henchmen.

FAW: All this is part of the country's ongoing campaign to confront the evils of its past. The latest, Berlin's Holocaust memorial, which honors the 6 million Jews killed during the war. Completed this spring at a cost of $160 million, it consists of nearly 3,000 slabs of concrete designed, said its architect, to resemble tombs on an open sea.

(To Ms.Deutschkron): Today do you find Germany is honestly trying to confront its past?

Ms. DEUTSCHKRON: No doubt about it. No doubt about it.

Photo of German Holocaust memorial FAW: Today the government spends millions of dollars to build monuments and to maintain concentration camps as museums; spends billions more, even now, as reparations to Israel. So much public admission of guilt, there is now in Germany a backlash -- a feeling, 60 years later: enough is enough.

Many Germans applaud that Holocaust memorial and agree all those public acts of contrition are the least the country can do.

BRIGIT: It should never be forgotten what the Germans have done to the Jewish people, so I think we must pay money.

Photo of Holocaust victim FAW: But a growing number of Germans -- it is impossible to determine exactly how many -- argue that after six decades, Germany has finally atoned: that it no longer needs to keep apologizing, much less spending money on memorials.

MITA: The money would be better on other projects, so I don't think it's very good.

ZEEMONA MUELER: I think there should be a stop by now.

(Voice of Translator SYLKE SCHUMANN): Why is that?

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Ms. MUELER: Because if you think about how old the people are, and they're not many survivors of the Holocaust anymore. And I think the children of today should have the money.

FAW: Signs of that backlash -- resentment against all the memorials and, increasingly, anger against Jews abound.

Photo of LARS RENSMANN Professor LARS RENSMANN (Potsdam University): Roughly 20 percent of Germans share anti-Semitic perceptions of Jews. The difference now is that due to the discourse on memory, on Holocaust memory, in recent years we finally see a rise of anti-Semitic attitudes.

FAW: The bitterness is expressed in many ways: more anti-Semitic graffiti, more angry letters about Jews in newspapers. Some synagogues have even been torched. Jewish places of worship are so at risk they are always protected.

(To Anetta Kahane): But the fact that you need security?

ANETTA KAHANE (Amadeu Antonio Foundation): Well, that's reality in Germany. That's reality, yes.

FAW: Anetta Kahane, whose organization tries to combat extremist views, says anti-Semitism is now on the upswing.

Tell me what happened to your daughter?

Photo of Anetta Kahane Ms. KAHANE: Oh, she was on the street, and there was a man who's always sitting in the restaurant. And when she passed he said, "Jewish pig."

FAW: But when she and her daughter reported the slur to police, Kahane says nothing happened.

Ms. KAHANE: It's more easy to express it, and they do it.

Prof. RENSMANN: We have this rise of public insults, that people write letters to the editors, but they're not anonymous anymore.

FAW: This is what alarms Rensmann and others: neo-Nazi sympathizers, rowdies known here as skinheads. When it comes to outsiders -- especially Jews -- there is no question where neo-Nazis stand or what they want.

UDO VOIGT (Neo-Nazi Leader, NPD) (Through Translator): We say Germany for the Germans. We don't welcome foreigners.

FAW: Neo-Nazi leader Udo Voigt, 60 years after World War II -- he argues it is high time Germany quit apologizing to the world.

Photo of UDO VOIGT Mr. VOIGT (Through Translator): We are more than ready to forget about it. No other country does what Germany does at the moment. That we are again and again and again reminding everyone, including ourselves, of what Germans committed 60 years ago.

FAW: And so much of that sentiment exists, analysts here agree, the political appeal of neo-Nazis is growing.

Prof. RENSMANN: You have a relatively solid extreme right youth culture which might lead to more anti-Semitic violence and so forth. I'm afraid the problem will, rather, extend in the long run than dissipate.

FAW: After 20 years researching Holocaust victims and perpetrators, sociologist Gabrielle Rosenthal agrees. Despite all the open acknowledgment here of the past, many Germans, she says, still want to camouflage the past.

Dr. GABRIELE ROSENTHAL (Sociologist): The more the family kept secrets, the more there is silence, the greater the impact [is], and the impact will not vanish.

FAW: So 60 years later, Germany still grapples with how to acknowledge one chapter in its past, a chapter which, even now, many here concede is ultimately unknowable.

Photo of INGE DEUTSCHKRON Ms. DEUTSCHKRON: I don't understand it either. How can one understand that there is -- that there are human beings who would think about and decide also how to kill, how to murder more cleanly or more rationally or more whatever. That is very difficult to understand.

FAW: Even now?

Ms. DEUTSCHKRON: Even now. Even for me.

FAW: In Germany, learning painfully the truth of William Faulkner's words that the past is never dead -- it's not even past. I'm Bob Faw for RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY in Berlin.

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