Jakarta Globe – AFP, Deborah Cole, August 20, 2013
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| The main gate is pictured at the former concentration camp in Dachau, southern Germany, on August 18, 2013. (AFP Photo) |
Berlin.
Angela Merkel will become the first German chancellor to visit the former Nazi
concentration camp Dachau on Tuesday as she steps up warnings about the
far-right threat while campaigning for a third term.
Ahead of an
evening election rally in Dachau, northwest of Munich, Merkel will arrive at
the memorial at 1645 GMT and, after making a short speech, lay a wreath of
flowers and tour the remnants of the camp.
Merkel, 59,
will be joined by the president of the Dachau camp committee of former
prisoners, Max Mannheimer, and other survivors. Only part of the visit will be
open to media.
The
93-year-old Mannheimer had long lobbied for Merkel to pay a visit to the camp
and said he saw her decision as “historic” and a “signal of respect for the
former detainees”.
The Nazis
opened Dachau as a concentration camp for political prisoners in March 1933,
just weeks after Adolf Hitler took power.
It was the
first such site in Germany and served as a model for all the camps to follow.
More than
200,000 Jews, gays, Roma, political opponents, the disabled and prisoners of
war were imprisoned in Dachau during World War II.
Over 41,000
people were killed, starved or died of disease before US troops liberated the
camp in April 1945.
The
memorial now attracts some 800,000 visitors each year.
Although it
will be the first visit by a German chancellor to Dachau, Merkel has gone to
other former Nazi concentration camps including Buchenwald with US President
Barack Obama in April 2010.
And former
president Horst Koehler, whose office is largely ceremonial, attended
commemorations of the 65th anniversary of the Dachau liberation three years
ago.
In her
weekly podcast, Merkel on Saturday warned ahead of the visit that Europeans
must remain vigilant against Holocaust deniers and right-wing extremists.
“We must
never allow such ideas to have a place in our democratic Europe,” Merkel said,
stressing how “inconceivable” the Nazis’ atrocities seemed today.
After her
visit, Merkel will hold a campaign rally the same evening in the town of Dachau
ahead of a Bavarian state poll and the German general election next month.
The
director of Bavaria’s historic memorials, Karl Freller, said that interest in
the former concentration camps had jumped since the start of a neo-Nazi murder
trial in Munich in May.
A far-right
trio known as the National Socialist Underground is believed to be behind 10
murders over a seven-year period, with most of the victims immigrant
shopkeepers.
The case
exposed serious failings of the German security services, which had focused
their investigation almost entirely on Germany’s large Turkish community and
ignored clues pointing to the neo-Nazi scene.
“Apparently
the trial has had the effect of making people want to focus more on National
Socialism” or Nazi ideology, Freller told Die Welt newspaper.
Historian
Michael Wolffsohn of the German military’s Bundeswehr University in Munich said
there was no reason to believe that the visit to the Dachau camp had anything
to do with the popular Merkel’s re-election campaign.
“For starters
it’s hard to draw much enthusiasm in this country with policy on [German]
history, particularly in relation to National Socialism,” he told the daily
Tagesspiegel Monday.
“However
something has changed in recent years — there is apparently no longer any
[political] risk involved in visiting a Nazi memorial at the height of the
election campaign.
“Merkel’s
choice is… a sign that Germans’ relationship with their history is becoming
more relaxed.”
Agence France-Presse
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