Market at Nazi Camp Site Brings Worldwide Outcry

Despite strong protests from Holocaust survivors around the world, local German officials said Thursday they cannot prevent a supermarket from opening on the grounds of the Ravensbruck Nazi concentration camp north of here.

But the supermarket chain and the state premier indicated Thursday night that they are having second thoughts about the project.

“There is no law against bad taste,” a spokesman for the Brandenburg state government, Manfred Schwarzkopf, had told the daily Berliner Zeitung earlier.

But Thursday night, Brandenburg’s position appeared to waver as state Premier Manfred Stolpe said he will review the controversy next week. And the Kaiser chain, hit hard by the outcry from abroad, backed away from its previous determination to go ahead with the opening.

“What can possibly be done has not yet been decided, and is certainly being considered,” Willi Schellen, a director of Kaiser’s parent Tengelmann Group, said in a radio interview. He said the company did not know when it planned the store that “the site was so burdened.”

Meanwhile, arsonists Thursday attacked both the Ravensbruck supermarket and another Kaiser’s in eastern Berlin. A group calling itself the Revolutionary Cell sent a letter to the German news agency DPA claiming responsibility for the two firebombings. It said the group “will not wait for a construction halt but will fight for it.”

The outcry over the nearly completed building, which is about a quarter of a mile from a memorial to the 92,000 women and children killed at Ravensbruck, brought strong denunciations Thursday from Jewish and Gypsy survivor groups in France, Belgium and Germany, from Germany’s small official Jewish community and from Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal in Vienna.

Ravensbruck “is a synonym for the unmeasurable sorrow and deaths of people whose memory every previous German government has felt a duty to hold high,” Wiesenthal said in a letter to Stolpe.

Brandenburg is one of the five new states carved out of what was East Germany.

The town of Furstenberg sold the land at Ravensbruck to a shopping center developer last year as part of the effort to privatize the formerly Communist country as quickly as possible.