Renaming Auschwitz

Poland is trying to get the Auschwitz extermination camp renamed to "the Former Nazi German Concentration Camp of Auschwitz." I don't have a particular view on that. The Poles want to emphasize that Auschwitz was a German operation, not a Polish one, and that seems sensible. I don't really understand why Jewish groups would oppose such a thing.

But it is kind of funny that an article on a story to add clarity to words confuses other words. First of all, Auschwitz was not a concentration camp, but an extermination camp, a Vernichtungslager. Therefore, the new name is not "completely accurate" as Jan Kasprzyk is quoted as saying.

A second one is a long-time pet peeve of mine. The article quotes Marek Edelman, described as "the last living leader of the wartime uprising by Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto against the occupying Nazis." Um, Germany occupied Poland, not the Nazi party. Few of the men who fought against Edelman in putting down the Warsaw Uprising were members of the Party. Most Germans in general were not. Therefore referring to a Nazi occupation of Poland or a Nazi invasion of Poland is misleading and inaccurate. It serves to effectively exonerate Germany as a whole.

When I lived in Germany, this was something I noticed a lot. Even in a small city like Bonn, there were many Holocaust related memorials. The exoneration implicit in a phrase like "Nazi occupation" was prevalent in these memorials. I remember coming across a plaque on a building on the Venusberg, noting that the building had served as a Sammellager, a collection camp where Jews from the region were temporarily housed while they were rounded up and whence they where shipped eastward. The plaque text was in German and the one word I remember very clearly was Mitbürger, fellow citizen, which was how the Jewish victims were described. Whoever wrote the plaque was placing the German people on the side of the Jews, though the truth was that the Party was very popular, and its anti-semitism quite prevalent throughout Germany long before Hitler came along.

Another memorial was part of the wall of a burned out synagogue, which was placed across the street from where the synagogue had actually stood. (The site of the synagogue is now a Holiday Inn.) The synagogue was burned down on Kristallnacht. I don't remember the exact words on the memorial, though it was mostly a quote from the book of Lamentations written in several languages, but I do remember the sense was that the Jews were the victims of of Nazi terror, again against fellow citizens. Well, Kristallnacht was not carried out by the Nazis, but rather regular citizens. Perhaps it was instigated and coordinated by the Party, and certainly local authorities did nothing to hamper the destruction, unless it threatened non-Jewish owned buildings and businesses. But still it was carried out by ordinary Germans, not by the Nazis.

This is, I think, one of the main reasons Germans really don't like to talk about the Nazi era. To talk about it is to ask what grandma and grandpa did back then. Did they help round up Jews and other targets of the government? Did they throw rocks on Kristallnacht? Did they vote for the Nazi lists in 1932 and 1933? These are uncomfortable questions to ask about family members. So they mostly just avoid the topic altogether.