Germany Dedicates Site for Holocaust Memorial

On the 55th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Germans dedicated the site for a national Holocaust memorial Thursday in a ceremony replete with the controversy that has delayed the monument for a decade.

The dedication at Berlin’s bustling Pariser Platz in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate was only symbolic, because neither groundbreaking nor construction can begin before legal questions about the site are resolved and persistent disputes settled over the scope and suitability of the project.

Mayor Eberhard Diepgen pointedly demonstrated his opposition to the monument that will occupy the new capital’s busiest square by not attending the dedication. Even the new leader of the German Jewish community, Paul Spiegel, used the occasion to note that the design calling for 2,700 tombstone-like slabs evoking the image of a Jewish graveyard is excessive in size and deficient in meaning because it fails to honor other victims of the Nazis.

But Auschwitz death camp survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel told Germans that they had struck the right balance between responsibility and remembrance.

“There are those who will say it’s too easy for you just to devote one day a year to pay homage and then go back to your business,” he told German lawmakers and dignitaries at the renovated Reichstag, the new seat of Parliament. “I don’t agree. I take your move very seriously.”

In an emotional speech that opened with a Hebrew prayer, Wiesel called on Germans to engender hope for the 21st century by asking Jews for forgiveness for the terrible crimes against humanity.

“Do it, and the world will know that its faith in this Germany is justified,” said Wiesel, a 71-year-old Romanian-born Jew whose family died at Auschwitz. “We desperately want to have hope for the new century.”

Wiesel urged those in attendance to ignore the “indecent voices” telling today’s Germans that their lack of guilt for the crimes of the Nazis means they should feel no shame. He appeared to be criticizing writer Martin Walser, who offended millions of Jews around the world in 1998 by berating fellow Germans for engaging in what he called an orgy of self-flagellation over the wrongs of another generation.

“By conspiring to obliterate the victims’ memory, those who want to turn the page are killing them a second time,” Wiesel said.

Spiegel, the newly elected head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told a Leipzig newspaper on the eve of the ceremony that he considers the monument unnecessary because there is already a Holocaust memorial in Israel and Berlin’s new Jewish Museum includes a stark tower in which visitors can reflect on the 6 million Jewish victims of the Nazis. He said a memorial here also should pay homage to the gypsies, communists, homosexuals and disabled people killed in the camps.

Construction on the memorial and accompanying center is expected to begin no earlier than the end of 2001 because the design of U.S. architect Peter Eisenman is being reworked. There also are legal challenges pending on use of the land.

Although the ceremony was snubbed by Diepgen, who has complained that the memorial is “too monumental” and would be more appropriate at one of the death camp sites, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and other senior government figures took part in the country’s fourth observance of Jan. 27 as Memorial Day for the Victims of Nazism. The date commemorates the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz by Allied forces, less than four months before their ultimate triumph over the Third Reich.