More than 75 years had to pass before people in Garching decided to commemorate the outpost of the Dachau concentration camp in today’s urban area. Acknowledgment of one’s own dark past comes late – but not too late like the criminal prosecution of the murderers of that time, which was kidnapped in the Federal Republic until the vast majority of the perpetrators were dead. Remembering the victims is always accompanied by a reminder that something like this must never happen again. And that is just as important today as it would have been decades ago.
Establishing a connection to the present is therefore absolutely necessary when one recalls the fate of the forced laborers in the Schleissheim SS camp. However, you have to be careful how you do it. When the artist Lioba Leibl, commissioned to design the memorial in today’s Hochbrück, draws parallels to modern forms of forced labor, she relativizes – indirectly and certainly unintentionally – the suffering of the victims of Nazi barbarism.
Because forced labor is not the same as forced labor. In the case of the Nazis, this was firmly embedded in the murder program under the keyword “annihilation through work”, to which millions of mainly Jewish women, men and children fell victim. It wasn’t just about the exploitation of labour, people were supposed to literally work so hard that at some point they dropped dead. You have to keep that in mind, even if the camp in Hochbrück was perhaps not one of the most horrific of the horrible places that existed at the time.
Incidentally, this should not be an objection to Leibl’s design for the planned memorial stele, which is quite impressive and convincing precisely because of its simple, woodcut-like aesthetics. However, the explanatory text on the planned plaque and the content that can be accessed via a QR code should be written by a historian, not the artist.