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<<Zvi Oster, request for discussion>> 11-29-98 When I first saw the NYT news release several weeks ago that Mr Spielberg was offering the Shoah collection of some 40,000 or more survivor videos for deposit and use in Berlin, I had VERY mixed emotions. I had a series of related reactions: * is this material Mr Spielberg's (or his Shoah Foundation's) property to dispose of as he wishes? * This collection may, ultimately, well take the place of the much debated Berlin Holocaust Memorial Monument, preempting the dedicated work of many honorable German citizens who fought long and hard for the realization of this dream/obligation . I well remember attending a Freie Stadt Berlin Senate session -a special privilege accorded to me under some special circumstances- during which the construction of the Holocaust Victim Memorial in Berlin was debated at length (copy of my report is available to interested members of this forum). I had been left with the impression "it will NEVER be built.". *Mr Naumann's point is well taken: many of the locations of former concentration camps serve as welcome PR photo-opportunity-backdrop, serve as 'Kranzabwurf' i.e. wreath drop sites. Nothing more. Does anyone remember President Reagan's misguided Bitberg-Belsen visit???! *And if indeed the Shoah Video collection does replace the much debated and fought over Holocaust Monument, the availbility of these survivor videos (even with a well structured and well researched, effective teaching program) will preempt some 20 years of hard and dedicated work by many well meaning German citizens and organisations who have fought for the monument. *Having deposited several such video testimonies in the past with several German research and educational organisations, and knowing that these were NOT always used well or appropriately, I have serious reservations and well founded doubts. *I have experienced twelve years of Holocaust in Germany : was the daughter of the elected leader of a large Jewish community and observed arrests, deportations -including my own- and assisted with/observed in the Jewish Community office and in my father's attorney office many administrative details of the various Nazi persecution-Aryanization-divorce-torture- deportations etc. At that time, during 1933-1945, I observed the first 'Holocaust' (tho the term was not applied) deniers in action--the SD, the Gestapo, the labor service, Wehrmacht members (perpetrators, witnesses, bystanders, executioners) et al, denying then that any killings took place (even punishing some non-Jews for spreading this 'ugly rumor'), using euphemistic terms of 'work detail,', 're-location' etc ... when they knew and we knew all along what was going on. *After the War, after 1945, I observed the second set of deniers -- people posing as (what we'd now refer to as) "Righteous Gentiles", claiming to have hidden certain Jews, when I knew to a certainty that the person in question had been killed! It took years before these lies were officially uncovered. *Living -again- in Germany, I observed the invisible Holocaust. No need denying what never happened. *And now, since the late eighties, we have some interest -- however these are The Children of the Perpetrators, Witnesses, Bystanders. They wish to study this strange phenomenon, but they also feel an obligation to explain, to white wash, to deny what happened. Hardly the ideal teachers. Hardly suited to explain and interpret the events. *Considering the fact that archival material disappears with sickening regularily from the Bundesarchiv and other German State and regional collections, which then allows for mis-representation and misinformation en masse, I further question the wisdom of this decision. *Further considering that well-intending German educators often use freely available Nazi documents to 'inform' current students about Holocaust history, I fear what will happen not only to the Shoah material but to the end use to which it will unltimately be put . In one case that I have been involved with, the Frankfurt Judenreferent Herr Inspektor Heinrich Baab (who personally is responsible for the killing of some 12,000 Jews) had written a 'memoir' after the War, while doing a very brief jail time, accusing some of the city's war time Jewish leadership of cooperation and a very peculiar-specific incident of sabotage (which never happened and would have been unbelievably foolish and ineffective) as the REASON why these people were sent to Auschwitz and killed. I happen to know the circumstances and could prove him wrong. This did not/does not keep his 'fake' documentation out of circulation, further besmirching the memory ofseveral courageous martyrs by 'exposing' their supposed stupidity. Not just blaming the victims, accusing them of having caused their own killing. *Faced with the recent testimony of a member of Dr Mengele's Auschwitz medical team that the gassings in Auschwitz were a 'mitzvah', sparing the inmates illness and disease...the Shoah research and teaching inside Germany is/will be a Kafkaesque absurdity. Is Mr Spielberg able to reverse this by sending the Shoah collection to Berlin? I fear not. Charlotte Guthmann Opfermann College of the Mainland.
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