Common commemoration – Fürstenfeldbruck – SZ.de

Every year on January 27, the liberation of the survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp by the Red Army is commemorated. This is also traditionally done in front of the memorials in Fürstenfeldbruck and Gröbenzell. In the district town, a little more than a hundred people came to commemorate together in a light snowfall. About half of them are police officers. The visitors also included numerous politicians such as the deputy district administrator Martina Drechsler, Germering’s mayor Andreas Haas and his Olching counterpart Andreas Magg, as well as the candidates for the Brucker mayoral election.

The Memorial Working Group of the Historical Association had invited to the event at the Death March Memorial at the corner of Dachauer Strasse and Augsburger Strasse. Its member Julia Zieglmeier opened the event with a short introduction, in which she recalled that the day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism was introduced in 1996 by the then Federal President Roman Herzog. This year the focus is on people who were persecuted by the Nazis because of their sexual orientation.

After the introduction, students at the Police College read passages from Christopher Browning’s study on the involvement of a reserve police battalion in the Shoah in Poland, from Max Mannheimer’s diary about the Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps and the Warsaw Ghetto, from Peter Gardosch’s account of his The ordeal through German concentration camps until they were liberated by American soldiers, and from the portrait by the SZ journalist Ronen Steinke about Fritz Bauer, who, as Hessian Attorney General, was one of the few lawyers who wanted to prosecute the perpetrators after 1945.

Students at the police college read passages from texts by survivors.

(Photo: Johannes Simon)

Anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp: After a minute's silence, the guests lay stones at the memorial according to Jewish tradition.

After a minute’s silence, according to Jewish tradition, the guests place stones at the memorial.

(Photo: Johannes Simon)

The words of Gardosch, who died last November, had a very special effect. Shortly before the end of the war he fled the Dachau concentration camp with other prisoners and deserted guards. The group made it to the vicarage in Puch. There they were allowed to rest for a few hours, given food and water before they had to leave.

The refugees quickly understood that the pastor “didn’t have the courage” to hide them. But he took the opportunity to have them sign a declaration in which they confirmed that he had received them in a friendly and Christian way. “The old man seems to have dirt on his hands, otherwise he wouldn’t need it,” suspected one of Gadosch’s companions. When they said goodbye, the pastor advised the group to try the monastery in Fürstenfeld. Ultimately, they managed to survive there until the Nazis surrendered.

The reading was accompanied by the Bavarian Police Orchestra. At the end of the event, after a minute’s silence, the participants laid flowers and, according to Jewish tradition, stones at the memorial commemorating the death march of Jewish concentration camp prisoners from the camps near Landsberg. It was built in 1994 by the artist Hubertus von Pilgrim.

Anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp: The victims of the National Socialists are also remembered at the memorial in Gröbenzell.

In Gröbenzell, too, the victims of the National Socialists are commemorated at the memorial.

(Photo: Johannes Simon)

In Gröbenzell, around 90 participants gathered in the afternoon in front of the memorial for the victims of National Socialism in front of the post office building, where Mayor Martin Schäfer (UWG) laid a wreath. Solène Feldhoffer and Benjamin Reiser, student representatives of the grammar school, read from the autobiographical novel by a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Otto Dov Kulka processed his ordeal in “Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death”. The Germans deported the nine-year-old and his mother to the Theresienstadt ghetto in 1942 and from there to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The mother was murdered in January 1945 in the Stutthof concentration camp. Kulka survived and emigrated to Israel in 1949.

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