Of
Martin Bernstein
The memorial for the victims of the death march of Dachau concentration camp prisoners in the district of Obermenzing was sprayed with an anti-Semitic slogan and glass bottles were thrown at them by unknown persons last week. On Friday, a 58-year-old woman from Munich informed the police. The anti-Jewish diatribe was sprayed onto the bronze sculpture with white paint. The State Security Commissariat 44 of the criminal police is looking for witnesses who have noticed something suspicious in the areas of Seldweg, Schirmerweg, Wiguläus-Hundt-Weg, Pippinger Straße or Verdistraße.
The sculpture created by the Pullach sculptor Hubertus von Pilgrim at the Blutenburger Weiher was erected in 2001. It commemorates the more than a thousand people who died on the death marches from the Dachau concentration camp. “No prisoner must fall into enemy hands alive,” Heinrich Himmler had ordered. Identical memorials are located in Munich’s urban area in Pasing and Allach.
Memorials are repeatedly the target of anti-Semitic attacks
The 22 Upper Bavarian death march memorials are repeatedly the target of anti-Semitic attacks – for example in 2019 in Reichersbeuern near Bad Tölz and in 2008 in Dorfen near Icking. In April of this year, unknown persons destroyed an information board at the “White Rose Fence” memorial in Munich’s Orleansstrasse. In November 2019, a stele in Schwabing’s Clemensstrasse commemorating the historian Michael Strich, who was murdered by the National Socialists, was smeared with paint. In June 2015, unknown persons carried out an arson attack on the “Jewish Life in Munich” exhibition on Sankt-Jakobs-Platz in the old town, and just over a year later on the resistance monument on Platz der Freiheit in Neuhausen.
Just a hundred meters away from the current crime scene, at the Obermenzinger church “Leiden Christi” stands the sculpture “Bent, empty chair” – another memorial to the memory of the Jews from Obermenzing who were deported and murdered during the Nazi era. In April 2019, the sculpture by artists Blanka Wilchfort and Marlies Poss was desecrated with SS runes. Back then, the perpetrators used white spray paint.