More Auschwitz/Holocaust links

Here are a few additional Holocaust links:

The Guardian (UK) Focus page on the Holocaust.  Has links to a number of Guardian articles.

Putin Expresses His Shame for Russia by Judith Ingram (AP) Moscow Times 01/28/05.

As world leaders and death camp survivors mourned victims of the Holocaust on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, President Vladimir Putin acknowledged Thursday that anti-Semitism and xenophobia had surfaced in Russia, tackling an issue that the Kremlin had long failed to confront directly.

Putin also signaled that Moscow would not revise its view that the Soviet Union was solely a victim of World War II -- refusing to accept arguments that it, too, held some responsibility for the conflict, due to the signing of a secret Soviet-Nazi pact that divided up Eastern Europe.

"Even in our country, in Russia, which did more than any to combat fascism, for the victory over fascism, which did most to save the Jewish people, even in our country we sometimes unfortunately see manifestations of this problem and I, too, am ashamed of that," Putin said at a forum near Krakow, to long applause.

This article has several interesting details of the politics of remembering the Second World War in Russia today.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/01/28/001.html

Mahnung am größten Friedhof der Welt Neues Deutschland 28.01.05 (German)  This paper is the official publication of the Partei der Democratischen Socializmus (PDS), the successor party to the Communist Party of the former East Germany.  It is sometimes referred to as a "post-communist" party.  There's nothing that distinctive about this particular news article, which is basically a factual report on the Auschwitz commemoration ceremony on January 27.

When it was the ruling party in East Germany, the official position on the Holocaust was that East Germany had no official responsibility for its consequences, because it was said to be the action of the Hitler dictatorship, not of the German farmers and workers, and the German farmers and workers state (as they described themselves) therefore has no continuing legal or practical responsibility.

I visited the Buchenwald concentration camp just outside of Weimar in 1991.  (There is also an English version of the Web page.) At that time, the signs in the camp were still from the Communist days.  I was struck by the fact that they emphasized the nationalities of the victims of the Holocaust and stressed the way political dissidents were victimized.  They certainly talked about Jewish victims, but the emphasis was not on the anti-Semitic aspects of the Nazi ideology and the resulting genocide.

The Web site I linked above doesn't have much.  But it does have a reminder about one of the complications in memorializing Buchenwald, which is that the Soviets also used it as a concentration camp for some period of time after the war.  I don't recall any metion of that aspect of its history in the old East German exhibits.  The statement of purpose for the Foundation from the Web page says:

The foundation's purpose is to preserve the sites of the crimes as sites of mourning and commemoration, to provide these sites with a scientifically founded form and outward appearance and to make them accessible to the public in an appropriate manner, as well as to promote the research of the respective historical occurrences and their conveyance to the public. At the Buchenwald Memorial, the history of the Nazi concentration camp is to receive priority within this context. The history of the Soviet internment camp is to be integrated into the scientific and museum work to an appropriate degree. At the Mittelbau-Dora Memorial, special attention is to be devoted to the subject of the exploitation of inmates for the production of weapons of destruction. The history of the two memorials' political instrumentalisation during the era of the German Democratic Republic is also to be represented.

Remembering history is a complicated process.