UNESCO listing of more Nazi camps sought
The largest Nazi concentration camp complex, Auschwitz Birkenau in Poland, is already inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list.
The largest Nazi concentration camp complex, Auschwitz Birkenau in Poland, is already inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AFP) — Former Nazi concentration camps should be added to the UNESCO World Heritage list, a group preserving the memorials urged Thursday, warning that “democracy can no longer be taken for granted.”
Directors of memorials at former camps including Dachau, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen joined forces at a conference in the Hague to lobby governments to push for their inclusion on the UNESCO list.
The memorial centers “visibly demonstrate what happens when the dignity of all human beings is not protected,” they said in a joint statement.
Micha Gelber, one of the last Dutch survivors of Bergen-Belsen, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that preserving the memory of the camps was all the more important given the rise of antisemitism in the Netherlands.
In recent days, two explosive devices have been placed outside a Jewish school in Amsterdam and a synagogue in Rotterdam, sparking fear and anger in the Jewish community.
“I always knew that antisemitism didn’t disappear after the war. It always remained and it has its ups and its downs,” said Gelber, 90.
“I think it is important to support any means, any possibility, of not forgetting,” added Gelber, who has shared his harrowing experiences with more than 1,000 schools and institutions.
Martine Letterie, one of the campaign’s organizers, said concentration camps were increasingly the target of vandalism, including far-right imagery daubed on sites.
The largest Nazi concentration camp complex, Auschwitz Birkenau in Poland, is already inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list.
But getting the other sites on the list “would mean they are preserved, whatever government there will be,” Letterie told AFP.
She pointed to Germany, where some in the far-right AfD party have pushed back against the country’s tradition of remembering the liberation of the camps.
One of its former leaders, Alexander Gauland, once notoriously described the Nazi era as just “a speck of bird poo” in German history.
“Populist parties are gaining force all over Europe, and they are not really in favor of guarding democracy and the rule of law,” Letterie told AFP.
“That is what we are worried about.”
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