theatre
Actors remember Nazi criminals on the run
Actress Meret Becker was already a “crime scene” commissioner. Now she was on the stage of the Berliner Ensemble for the play “Rats on the Run – How Nazi Perpetrators Could Escape”. photo
© Jens Kalaene/dpa
Well-known actors such as Meret Becker and Johann von Bülow appear on stage in the Berliner Ensemble. Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer and the Israeli ambassador sit in the audience.
On the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, celebrities took part in a play in Berlin remembers the escape of Nazi criminals after the Second World War. The actors Meret Becker, Sabin Tambrea, Alice Dwyer, Johann von Bülow and Uwe Preuss stood on the stage of the Berliner Ensemble for the play “Rats on the Run – How Nazi Perpetrators Could Escape”. In addition to Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer (102), Bundestag Vice President Katrin Göring-Eckardt and Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor were also in the audience in the sold-out hall.
The Ilse Holzapfel Foundation, which organized the evening, said they wanted to keep the memory of “the system failure in post-war Germany” alive. Hundreds of Nazis were not held accountable for their actions. The foundation was founded in 1993 by German playwright Rolf Hochhuth and named after his mother Ilse Holzapfel.
The piece will not be performed again
The play by director Alexander Pfeuffer, which according to the foundation will not be performed again, is a kind of search for clues as to how this could have happened. The actors, dressed in dark clothing, chorally and impressively talk about a bishop who helped escape and three Nazi officials who wanted to avoid punishment.
For example, it’s about the Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in July 1987 for crimes against humanity. Known as the “Butcher of Lyon,” Barbie was wanted by German and French authorities after World War II for atrocities he committed as Gestapo chief in Lyon from 1942 to 1944. He was tracked down in Bolivia.
Since 1996, the victims of National Socialism have been commemorated in Germany on January 27th, and in 2005 the United Nations declared this day International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the survivors of the German Auschwitz extermination camp. The Nazis murdered more than a million people there, mostly Jews.