Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Disrespecting Germany's Holocaust Memorial

The German authorities were preparing for criticism from the Jewish community after it was revealed that a Holocaust memorial in Berlin was being used as a public bathroom by tourists and by neo-Nazi sympathizers.

The revelation in a Berlin newspaper is likely to trigger a new debate about how the Holocaust should be remembered in Germany.

One argument against building the monument, which consists of 2,700 concrete slabs resembling Jewish gravestones, was that it would become a target of anti-Semitic vandals. The managers of the memorial, which attracts 3.5 million visitors a year, have tried to play down the scandal.

"This just belongs to the teething problems of any new monument," Uwe Neumaerker, of the Memorial Foundation, said.

The German government has been aware of the problem since the monument was completed in May 2005 but has tried to maintain a silence for fear of encouraging more vandalism.

The defacing of Jewish memorial areas in Germany by right-wing hard-liners has become a widespread problem that is acknowledged rarely.
Where does one begin with a story like this? Defacing a memorial to the brutality of the Nazis because people are using it as an open-air toilet is a scandal of major proportions. Is there no one securing the site to prevent such acts from occurring? The problem has been going on for more than a year and a half and the German government is trying to contain the scandal. That's scandalous in and of itself.

To consider this simply teething problems is symptomatic of the problem. This isn't a teething problem. There is nothing wrong with the memorial, but with those who seek to deface it on purpose or those who use the location as a toilet. It is the ongoing criminality of those who deface this memorial to the memories of the millions of German Jews murdered by the Nazis. Better security and policing of the area would be a good start to eliminating the problem - neo-Nazis and people who think nothing of doing their business in the public.

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