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How Germans Remember the Holocaust

(Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies-Bar-Ilan University) Roie Yellinek - In Nuremberg, Germany has constructed a museum to remember the era of Nazi rule. The area of the museum was the site of a huge construction project designed to glorify the name of Hitler and his party. The museum's introductory video expresses pride at the tremendous size of the Nazi-era project. The museum displays the historical process that began with the birth of Hitler and ended with the Nuremberg trials after the war ended. In the entire museum, the Holocaust is mentioned only three times. One mention is near the monument to the six million dead, built in cooperation with the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel. The reference on the monument is to "people," not "Jews," though the names appearing on it are Jewish. The museum tries to bestow on the German people a history that is easier to stomach than the historical reality. The museum's narrative states that 1) the Germans were led into a situation that almost forced them to start the war; 2) things took place during the Nazi regime that Germans can be proud of; 3) the Germans were also victims, and some of them opposed the regime; and 4) the Holocaust belongs on the margins of historical memory. The writer is a doctoral student in Middle East Studies at Bar-Ilan University and a fellow at the Kohelet Policy Forum.
2019-06-14 00:00:00
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