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Thursday, April 17, 2008 No Berlin stop
for Shoah train By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL,
BERLIN A VICIOUS public spat between
the head of the Düsseldorf Jewish community
and the CEO of Deutsche Bahn, the German railway
system, has exposed the extraodinary tensions that
have plagued a Holocaust exhibition called the
"Train of Commemoration." On Thursday, the public prosecutor in
Düsseldorf dismissed a criminal complaint
lodged by Deutsche Bahn CEO Hartmut Mehdorn
that charged the director of the city's
7,500-member Jewish community, Michael
Szentei-Heise, with defamation and slander. The complaint was originally filed after a
non-Jewish grassroots-initiated
Holocaust-remembrance project, the "Train of
Commemoration," and German Jewish leaders
criticized Mehdorn and the railway's management for
impeding the remembrance project. "The public sees you and your political
structure such that, if you had been in the same
position in the Third Reich as today, you would
have directed the very same thing, perhaps with
greater conviction, as your predecessor at the
time," Szentei-Heise said in a speech early last
month that prompted Mehdorn to initiate legal
action against him. The Train of Commemoration is meandering its way
across Germany, showing photos and letters of
Jewish, Roma and Sinti children who were deported
by the Nazis to death camps during World War II.
(Roma and Sinti are usually referred to as
Gypsies.) The display devotes space to the officials who
worked for the Reichsbahn, the predecessor of the
Deutsche Bahn, and participated in the mass murder
of European Jewry. According to Mehdorn's critics, the Deutsche
Bahn has: refused to allow the mobile exhibit to
stop at the bustling Hauptbahnhof train station in
the heart of Berlin; charged exorbitant fees for
the usage of tracks; and neglected the WWII roles
of railway employees and officials. There is "no word about those who committed the
crimes," Hans-Rüdiger Minow, a spokesman for
the Train of Commemoration, told The Jerusalem
Post. He said 200,000 train employees were
involved in the deportations and "10,000 to 20,000
were responsible for mass murders," but were never
prosecuted. Jens-Oliver
Voss, a spokesman for the Deutsche Bahn,
told the Post that since 2002, Deutsche Bahn has
had a "permanent exhibition" in Nürnberg
devoted to the "role of the German railway
during National Socialism." He said that in contrast to other firms such as
automaker Mercedes-Benz and steel giant Thyssen
Krupp, who "earned money" during the Nazi period,
Deutsche Bahn had examined its company history in
an exemplary way. As for the criticism from the Train of
Commemoration organizers, Deutsche Bahn was
required by law to charge fees for the use of the
tracks, and a stop at Berlin's largest station
would have created "delays" and "hampered the
entire transportation in Berlin," Voss said. Speaking from Düsseldorf, Szentei-Heise,
the Jewish community leader, said the "thought that
Deutsche Bahn continued to earn" profits by
charging fees was "disgusting." In his March speech, which triggered national
press coverage of the dispute with the Deutsche
Bahn, Szentei-Heise said, "For me it looks as
though those who are in authority today are sorry,
in retrospect, to have sent little children to
death for free, and want to compensate for this
loss of money by charging a fee in connection with
this train, which in fact memorializes those
children. I can't see any other reason for this
contemptuous cynicism." Voss declined to comment on the dismissal of the
criminal complaint against Szentei-Heise. In response to the chorus of criticism, Deutsche
Bahn offered to donate ¤100,000 to a Jewish
organization. The general-secretary of the Central
Council of Jews in Germany, Stephan Kramer,
said, "That seems likes selling indulgences." He
criticized Deutsche Bahn for using "anti-Semitic
clichés" in its effort to silence
critics. Some argue that the train exhibit typifies a
German obsession with the period between 1933 and
1945 at the expense of ignoring Iran's desire to
destroy the Jewish state. Henryk M. Broder, a leading cultural and
political journalist, called the exhibit
"superfluous," saying there was no shortage of
memorials "paying attention to dead" Jews. He argued the exhibit alleviates the "bad
conscience" in Germany, but that no one is
addressing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threats
that Iran will "wipe Israel off the map." Szentei-Heise concurred with Broder's focus on
Iran, saying he "can see the parallels" between the
Holocaust and a possible second Holocaust launched
by an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel. He added that it was "very difficult to
transmit" this message to the German public. When asked about the Iranian threat to 6 million
Israelis, Minow, from the Train of Commemoration,
said, "We would make a huge mistake when we
instrumentalize the dead" and use "these
testimonials for Iran." This, he said, was
"blasphemy." -
Our
dossier on the origins of
anti-Semitism
When
German conformist historian, Professor Eberhard
Jäckel, invented a Holocaust train for
German TV
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