New approach needed to commemorate Auschwitz

Germany needs a new approach to its culture of remembrance, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck said on Sunday to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz.

Writing in Berlin’s Tagesspiegel newspaper in an article published on Sunday, Habeck, the lead candidate for the Greens in the February 23 elections, paid tribute to the work done on the commemoration of Nazi-era crimes over past decades.

“But we stand today before the renewed task of keeping the culture of remembrance alive, so that it keeps us awake, under new conditions, with new challenges,” he wrote.

“In many respects we are living through a period of transition,” Habeck wrote.

He noted that few of the perpetrators of Nazi crimes were still alive, and that only a few victims could still bear witness. Memory and horror were increasingly less connected with the parents or grandparents of people today.

“In addition, our country has long become a home for millions of people with a migration background, who have no biographical link to German responsibility for the Nazi past,” Habeck wrote.

History was also being distorted, with few checks on this process. “A new approach is needed to justify the need for remembrance and to explain the ‘Never Again’ message,” he wrote.

The Red Army liberated the notorious concentration camp, where up to 1 million Jews were murdered, along with Romani and Soviet prisoners of war, in January 1945. “Auschwitz” has since become a byword for Nazi atrocity.