Workshop with Muslim Youth

Toby Axelrod describes a workshop for Muslim youth in Berlin:

"

Onur looks intently at the photomontage. From all the famous news images, he picks one: New York’s World Trade Center aflame.

“Did you know that the Jews were warned before to get out?” he whispers. “I read it on the Internet.”

Onur, 15, and his classmates are participating in a weeklong educational program at the Wannsee House Memorial and Educational Centre in Berlin, the site where Nazi leaders in 1942 worked out their genocidal plan for the Jews.

[...]

Teachers across Germany say they face a special challenge from those of immigrant backgrounds, most of whom are Muslims. Disenfranchised from the mainstream, many of these students echo anti-Semitic attitudes heard at home, trade schoolyard insults about Jews or express Holocaust denial, testing German taboos.

[...]

To be sure, Germany’s problems with far-right groups are bigger than those with Muslim youths, few of whom are criminals or extremists.

[...]

But it is likely that most of Onur’s Berlin classmates had never knowingly met a Jew when they began their weeklong program at the Wannsee House. At the outset of their visit there, the teens from Onur’s school fidgeted and whispered while educator Elke Gryglewski asked them to pick a photo of a historical event that impressed them. Finally, Gryglewski told them what had happened in the very building where they were sitting.

“Was Hitler ever here?” one student asked.

“No,” Gryglewski answered. “It was in this house that Nazi leaders decided how to kill millions of people.”

Gradually the yawning and fidgeting stopped. Gryglewski introduced the teens to Nazi racial pseudoscience, asking them if they could tell who was Jewish in a series of old photos. The students seemed surprised to discover they could not.

The Jews “were just like you children with their own families and identity,” Gryglewski told them. “And then came the Nazis.”

Eventually, Jews could not go to the movies, she went on. They could not have pets. They could not go for a walk in the park. They could not use public transport.

“Verboten, verboten, verboten,” she said.

Some Jews managed to get out of Germany, but many did not, she explained. In the end, “this is all that was left of many of them,” Gryglewski said, showing them a large photo of victims’ shoes from Auschwitz. The students leaned in for a better look.

“I used to curse the Jews, and I won’t do it anymore,” one student, Yasemin, 15, said during a break. “I used to say Jews are s—t because they hate Muslims. But now I understand better. And now I hate the Nazis.”"

More here

New DVD about Max Lorenz

Bloomberg.com reviews a new DVD about Max Lorenz:

"hough homosexually inclined and married to a Jew, Lorenz thrived in Nazi Germany.

Had Lorenz been a singer of Mozart, say, or Puccini, he and his wife would surely have ended up in Theresienstadt, the designated camp for the art elite.

But Lorenz specialized in the heroes of Wagner, especially Siegfried, whose lusty presence animates the last two operas of the “Ring” cycle. And he was one of the greatest, ever."

[...]

"Despite such dangerous escapades, Lorenz loved his wife, Lotte, and refused to abandon her, thereby enraging Goebbels, the propaganda minister, for whom mixed couples were a particular abomination. He engineered to have Lotte and her mother dragged off one morning in 1943 by the Gestapo (even with Germany doing poorly in the war, he kept to his priorities).

In the hysterical machinations that ensued, both were quickly saved by the intercession of Hermann Goering, another opera nut who presided over the Berlin Staatsoper and, in his spare time, the air force. He signed a long official letter affirming Hitler’s protection of tenor, wife and mother-in-law. We get a glimpse of the document during the program, along with photos and film snippets of Winifred Wagner, the chatelaine of Bayreuth and Hitler adorant. "

More here.

You can learn more about mixed couples in Nazi Germany in our "Classic Jewish Tour" or take a customised tour about Jews in German Music.

Black Victims of the Nazis

The Voice online dedicated an article to one of the less known groups victimised by the Nazis: Germans (and later, people from occupied Europe) who were Black, or of African heritage.

There were an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 black people living in Germany at the time of Hitler coming to power. Some were Africans who had come from German colonies, some from the French African troops who had stayed in Germany after the First World War, and others from other parts of the world who were working in Germany often as entertainers.

Prior to Hitler coming to power, black entertainers were popular in Germany, but the Nazi hatred of other ‘inferior’ races led to a ban on Jazz music which was seen as ‘corrupt negro music’.

While not subject to an orgainsed, official policy of ethnic extermination like the Jews, black people did not escape the ideology of German racial purity. Apart from those that were forcibly sterilised, others mysteriously disappeared, or ended being used for medical experiments.

Mixed-race people were not allowed to go to university, prevented from joining the military and kept out of many jobs. It was a terrifying time because no person of black origin felt safe. Not knowing if one day there time may be up.

(SOURCE: The Voice Online, The forgotten black victims of Nazi Germany ).

The Voice adds: The Imperial War Museum in London will feature a lecture ‘Black Victims of the Nazis’ on February 22 , 1.00pm - 4.30pm at Museum Conference Room. The lecture will focus on the Black victims of Nazi persecution before and during the Second World War. Films will include Black Victims of the Nazis, about the Black population in Germany during the Second World War.

In Berlin, you can find Stolperstein for one of the Afro-German victims of Nazism, actor Bayume Mohamed Husen, who was murdered in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.