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

German Jews outraged with Nazi-era newspaper reprint

Publisher Peter McGeehad an idea: reprinting old newspapers issues of historical events, with commentary. In Germany, he called his project "Zeitungszeugen" and included copies of issues from January 30, 1933 - when Hitler rose to power.

Times Magazine reports that "the first issue of the series includes not only a reprint of Der Angriff — whose editor and most strident columnist was propaganda chief Josef Goebbels — but also the communist paper Der Kämpfer and the more moderate Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. The facsimiles are bound inside pages of commentary and analysis intended to give them context. "

The project is highly controversial. "Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, is unconvinced by that argument. "As a survivor of the Shoah, these texts are much more to me than just interesting historical sources. They are part of the horrible reality that I managed to escape. Millions of other Jewish people weren't so lucky," Knobloch said in a statement to TIME."

""I'm highly dubious about this project," Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council, told Reuters"

To learn more about Hitler's rise to power and media in Nazi Germany, you can also book our Weimar Period or The Third Reich tours.

The "Reichspogromnacht" debate on "Repeat Offender"

On his blog, "Repeat Offender", Gal Beckermann wrote a long and interesting commentary about the embarassing Bundestag debate, around the declaration denouncing Antisemitism (the article also appeared on NEXTBOOK — November 26, 2008):

"Early last month, the Christian Democrat representative proposed to add—to the standard elegiac language remembering the Holocaust—a clause that instantaneously upended the negotiations: “it must be recalled that Israel was never recognized by East Germany, that Jewish businesspeople were dispossessed by the East German government and had to flee, and that East Germany broke international law by delivering weapons to an anti-Israeli Syria in 1973.”

[...]

From at least 1967, the Communist world was officially anti-Zionist. East Germany, like its Soviet overlord, offered financial and propaganda support to belligerent Arab regimes. Cartoons in newspapers depicted Israeli soldiers as Nazis and the state sheltered PLO militants. The Zionist entity was an imperializing force, an oppressor whose existence should be mercilessly opposed.

[...]

While the Communist East maintained its anti-Zionist position, West Germany spent the post-war years rebuilding international goodwill through the hundreds of millions of dollars it threw at the Jewish state in the 1950s and ’60s."

(It should be noted, at this point, that the PLO and the Arab countries had good relationships with the West, which also sold them weapons - for example, despite Israeli protests, to Egypt in the early 1960s. The government back then was CDU ruled; and because money talks, Germany is doing business with Iran as we write this).