A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [213]
One of the first problems with making Germany “great again” was that it was still a nation in disrepute because of what it had done the last time it was great. For this reason a major part of the neo-Nazi agenda everywhere was to establish that the Holocaust did not happen. This was an oddly flawed argument that basically claimed both that the Holocaust never happened and furthermore that the Jews deserved it. Nowhere was this contradiction more succinctly stated than on the walls of a suburb north of Paris, where it was scrawled in matching penmanship both “Auschwitz is a lie” and “Gas the Jews.”
The right was able to offer Germans not only the catharsis of racial hatred but also freedom from guilt. Germans who were born after 1945 had spent their lives with the guilt of Nazi Germany around their neck. Now the extreme right was freeing them. Republican leader Schonhuber was promising that there would no longer be “a television program of Dachau on channel one, Treblinka on two, and Auschwitz on three.” He called for an end to all this examination of the past, presumably including an end to the examination of his own SS record—freedom at last from the legacy of guilt and at the same time Germans could blame all their current problems on foreigners. Auschwitz is a lie, and the Jews should be gassed.
After unification the issue inevitably arose, as it had in Poland, of what to do with the concentration camps that had been in the GDR, where the Communist version of history had been imposed on them. Two forms of revisionism were being attempted at East German camps. One was an attempt to ignore, banalize, and forget the sights. There was a cobblestone road leading up to the Ravens-brilick camp, where 200,000 women had been imprisoned, of whom 90,000 had been beaten, tortured, starved, shot, or gassed to death. The road itself had been built by forced women's labor from the camp. At the entrance to the road was a stark black-and-white sign that said “Frauen-KZ Ravensbrlick,” Ravensbruck Women's Concentration Camp. Next to it was a red triangle, implying that it had been a camp for Communist political prisoners. That was one of the badges used in the camps. But the sign made no reference to other badges, such as the yellow triangle, which was used for Jewish prisoners.
Next to the sign was another one with a palm tree, which said “Sylvia's Fitness Center.” There, at the camp entrance, a sauna and solarium were made available, in spite of protests. As a compromise, the fitness center sign was moved slightly away from the camp sign. Across the street was built a new but empty supermarket with a fresh unblemished blacktop parking lot, new windows, checkout lanes, and fresh wires hanging from the ceiling waiting for fixtures. That was as far as the supermarket got before international pressure stopped it from opening. A rival supermarket chain decided to try for one next to Sachsenhausen.
Sachsenhausen had been mostly leveled. One of the few remaining barracks had been burned down by neo-Nazis in 1992. The small triangular field where the camp had once been was now marked with various Soviet monuments. But a pathology laboratory for medical experiments, the remains of a gas chamber, and crematoriums with their iron racks were still there. Nearby, on the site of an SS barracks, the town of Oranienburg had plans to build a new housing project, complete with a fitness center.
But the other kind of revisionism was also in evidence. In addition to building new housing, there was a move for a new monument to the victims of Stalin. While the other Allies had also had prison camps in which many died of diseases, tens of thousands had died of illness and starvation in the Soviet camps. Sachsenhausen was one of a number of concentration camps that, after Liberation, the Red Army had used to imprison Nazis, black marketeers, prostitutes, and political