Amid Wall celebrations, Germans remember Nazi horrors too

Nov 9, 2009, 13:40 GMT

Berlin - Amid joyful celebrations of the 1989 end of the Berlin Wall on Monday, sombre memorial events recalled another November 9 in Germany, when the Nazis unleashed murderous violence against Jews.

At synagogues, the Jewish community remembered 'Reichskristallnacht,' the night of broken glass in 1938, when Jewish shops, homes and synagogues were ransacked and dozens of Jewish people were seriously or fatally injured by uniformed Nazi groups.

Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, warned that celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall must not overshadow the memory of November 9, 1938.

'We must not forget that it was not just the gates to freedom which opened 20 years ago. The November pogrom 71 years ago already portended the opening of the gates of Auschwitz (death camp),' said Knobloch.

German President Horst Koehler echoed that in a statement, saying, 'November 9, 1938 and November 9, 1989 are linked.'

He portrayed them as a beginning and ending. The world had trusted Germany, letting it reunify after the fall of the Wall, because 'we Germans learned the necessary lessons' from the Second World War.

The 1938 descent into violence, with burning buildings and German neighbours failing to protect Jews, is seen as the begin of systematic persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany culminating in the Holocaust.

'I think we have to remember the most important things. First of all the evil face of Naziism in 1938, with the burning of synagogues, and the positive thing with the fall of the Wall,' said Maya Zehden, spokeswoman for the Jewish community of Berlin.

That makes it an emotionally complicated day for the Jews in Berlin, Zehden added. Jews were worried that many Germans considered the Holocaust to be part of the past and an issue that was now closed.

But she said Jews did not disapprove of the Wall celebrations.

'You cannot go through life in perpetual sadness,' she said.

Knobloch, 77, who survived the Holocaust as a foster-child whose Jewish identity was concealed, said, 'Reunified Germany must show that it still feels committed to democratic principles - in the awareness of the dark side of its history.'

She pointed to vandalism at a synagogue in the city of Dresden where swastikas were daubed on an outside wall.

'Anti-Semitism is still a serious problem in Germany,' she said.