69th memorial event of the DGB Youth Bavaria – Anger instead of grief – Dachau

“Remembrance must live and remember means fight”, says Eva Wohlfahrt, the chairwoman of the DGB-Jugend Bayern, in her welcoming speech for the nearly 300 visitors of the event commemorating the pogrom night of November 9th to 10th, 1938 on the roll call square of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. The night with its unimaginable outburst of hatred was the first big step on the way to the Shoah. For 69 years the young Bavarian trade unionists have been remembering this “night of shame, in which synagogues and Jewish shops were attacked and destroyed. A night in which Jews were tortured and murdered.”

The Bavarian trade union youth began commemorating the victims of National Socialism as early as 1952, at a time when the crimes of the Nazi era and above all the Shoah were being suppressed and kept silent in German society. “To remember is to fight, is the motto of our remembrance,” emphasizes Wohlfahrt again emphatically. This is how the victims of National Socialism should be remembered and at the same time called for political engagement, democratic cooperation, tolerance and peace. Because the young trade unionists fight “every day for a solidary society in which it doesn’t matter where you come from, what skin color you have, whom you love or what religion you belong to”. The fight is also directed against pacting with right-wing parties in parliaments, against right-wing networks in the police, to prevent such horrific attacks as the one in Hanau, in which nine people with a migration background were murdered by a right-wing extremist.

Wohlfahrt also commemorates the Auschwitz survivor Esther Bejerano, who died in July at the age of 96. The singer, who was on stage almost until her death, “was a very special campaigner for us against fascism and for social cohesion”. She understood how to “get into conversation with young people and keep the memory of the horrors of the Holocaust alive”. The DGB youth chairwoman ended her address with a quote from Bejerano: “For me, anti-fascism is the most important thing we have to prevent these right-wing extremists from getting the upper hand.”

From the roll call square, visitors make their way to the crematorium, where traditionally the commemorative speech is given and wreaths are laid. At one station on the way, two biographies of Nazi victims are read aloud: First, that of the communist and resistance fighter Anton Saefkow, who was interned in Dachau concentration camp and murdered in Brandenburg in 1944. Then that of the married couple Maria and Heinrich List, who hid a Jewish acquaintance on their farm in 1941 and was betrayed. The acquaintance managed to escape to Switzerland, Heinrich List was sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where he died on October 5, 1942.

Open detailed view

The journalist then stops at the crematorium Süddeutsche Zeitung, Ronen Steinke, the actual commemorative speech, downright angry reckoning with the handling of Nazi history in large parts of society and politics. He feels overwhelmed to stand in this place, where many of the more than 41,000 prisoners who perished and murdered in the Dachau camp were burned. “When you start to let that go, the pressure becomes very heavy, almost unbearable,” he explains. The right way to deal with a place like this is not grief, and certainly not fear, because it makes you weak, but anger. “The Shoah was a mass murder of millions of people.” It must cause anger at the indifference of many people towards this crime. School classes are to be sent to concentration camp memorials in the expectation of solving the problem of anti-Semitism and fascism. “A topic every year in the summer slump.”

In Steinke’s view, however, it also takes anger against politicians who say today: “Migration is the mother of all problems.” It takes anger when individual cases are mentioned every time police officers are caught sending right-wing extremist or anti-Semitic emails. At the end of his rather short address, Steinke returned to the event’s motto: “Remembering is not an end in itself, remembering means fighting.” After a minute of silence, wreaths will be laid at the memorial for the unknown prisoner, musically framed by the “Zwetschgendatschi” band, among other things with Italian resistance songs.

On this Monday from 7 p.m. in the Ludwig-Thoma-Haus, the Dachau victims of the November pogroms will be remembered. Sabine Bloch, daughter of Kurt Bloch, who was expelled from Dachau, will tell about the life of her father, who died in 1961. On the night of November 9, two SA men in Dachau visited 15 Jewish men and women with a list of names and forced them to leave the city “before sunrise”. The synagogues in Germany burned the next night. A little later, around 11,000 Jewish men were deported to the Dachau concentration camp, including Kurt Bloch, Samuel Gilde and Julius Kohn from Dachau. Gilde and Kohn and the former Dachau residents Alice Jaffé, Vera and Hans Neumeyer, Melitta and Max Wallach were later murdered in the extermination camps.