Synchronicity
In my news reader from today link to an article at IHT
BERLIN: Most countries celebrate the best in their past. Germany unrelentingly promotes its worst.
The enormous Holocaust memorial that dominates a chunk of central Berlin was completed only after years of debate. But the building of monuments to the Nazi disgrace continues unabated. On Monday, the German minister of culture, Bernd Neumann, announced that construction could begin in Berlin on two monuments, one near the Reichstag to slain members of the gypsy groups, known here as the Sinti and Roma, and another not far from the Brandenburg Gate to gays and lesbians killed in the Holocaust.
In November they broke ground on the long-delayed Topography of Terror center at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters. And in October, a huge new exhibition opened at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. At the Dachau camp outside Munich, a new visitor center opens this summer. The city of Erfurt is planning a museum dedicated to the crematoriums. There are currently two competing exhibitions about the role of the German railroads in delivering millions to their deaths.
This Wednesday marks the 75th anniversary of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party taking power in Germany, which remarkably has prompted yet a new round of soul-searching.
“Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame?” said Avi Primor, the former Israeli ambassador to Germany, at an event commemorating the Holocaust and the liberation of Auschwitz on Friday in Erfurt. “Only the Germans had the bravery and the humility
and a link to the CBC Archives: Life After Auschwitz (many good pieces there) where this Canadian disgrace can be seen (originally broadcast Oct. 6, 1982) can be seen. It is a very black mark on Canada.
likes to think of itself as a sanctuary for the oppressed. But, as we see in this CBC Television clip, the Canadian government did everything in its power to bar the door to European trying to flee Nazi persecution. Irving Abella, co-author of the new book None Is Too Many, argues that Canada did less than other Western countries to help the Jews despite mounting reports of Adolf ’s genocide.
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