At a Former Concentration Camp, Holocaust Survivors Draw Parallels Between Nazi

and Russian Rhetoric

Speakers at a ceremony marking the liberation of Flossenbürg condemned Russian
President Vladimir Putin’s claims of demilitarizing and de-Nazifying Ukraine

Visitors lay wreaths at the “Square of Nations,” a memorial site at the former
Flossenbürg concentration camp’s crematorium, on April 24, 2022. Ferdinand
Kauppert
Carrie Hagen

Contributing Writer

“From prejudice to hatred to violence to murder, the paths are very short,” said
Karl Freller, director of the Bavarian Memorial Foundation, to an audience of
more than 500 at the Holocaust memorial site where the Nazi concentration camp
Flossenbürg once stood. The crowd, including six survivors of the camp, had
gathered in the German state of Bavaria on April 24, the 77th anniversary of the
camp’s liberation. During a moment of silence honoring the roughly 30,000 people
who died at Flossenbürg, attendees also remembered two Holocaust survivors
killed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Boris Romantschenko and Vanda
Semyonovna Obiedkova.

The invasion loomed large over the commemoration—an unsurprising shadow given
the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who have sought refuge in Germany since
the conflict began, as well as Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s distortions of
World War II history as a justification for his warmongering. He’s spoken of a
quest to “demilitarize and de-Nazify” Ukraine, a country with a Jewish
president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and a thriving Jewish population of between
49,000 and 400,000. (Ukraine’s last census took place in 2001, meaning more
recent exact figures are hard to come by.) Zelenskyy, for his part, has refuted
these claims by drawing parallels between Putin and Adolf Hitler.

The grounds of the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial Site

The grounds of the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial Site © Flossenbürg
Memorial / Photo by Rainer Viertlböck

In Putin’s version of events, any attempt to assert Ukrainian sovereignty is a

Nazi one, a continuation of the 20th-century battle between Russia and Ukrainian
nationalists, some of whom allied themselves with Nazi invaders during the war
in a bid to gain independence from the Soviet Union. On Monday, as Russia
celebrated its triumph over Nazi Germany on so-called Victory Day, Putin
reiterated his earlier arguments, declaring that Russian soldiers “are fighting
for the Motherland, for its future, so that no one forgets the lessons of World
War II, so that there is no place in the world for torturers, death squads and
Nazis.”

Reflecting on the links between the Russia-Ukraine war and the Holocaust during
last month’s commemoration at Flossenbürg, Rachel Salamander, an editor and
publisher who was born in a displaced persons camp in 1949, said, “For almost a
decade, until the start of industrial mass murder, propaganda had fooled the
population into believing that Jews weren’t human, so that they consequently had
to be exterminated.” Today, she added, “we hear that Ukrainians are neo-Nazis
and fascists who must be destroyed. The deadly method is depriving people of
their humanity, depriving them of their legitimacy in order to justify
genocide.”

To stop this “deadly method,” German culture minister Claudia Roth challenged
the audience to assume a greater responsibility in remembrance culture by
personalizing survivors’ memories. “What do we mean,” she asked, “when we swear
to each other that what happened may never happen again?”

Soviet soldiers in 1941

Soviet soldiers in 1941 Public domain via Library of Congress
Germany’s culture of remembrance, which has long centered on survivor narratives
and oral histories, faces a near-future without any living witnesses to the
genocide. Flossenbürg and Dachau, whose sites are now overseen by the Bavarian
Memorial Foundation, represented two of the nearly two dozen concentration camps
designated for the mass murder, forced labor and detention of Jews and other
marginalized groups during World War II. (In total, the Nazis operated more than
44,000 camps, subcamps, ghettos and holding centers.) Staff at the memorials
have, in recent years, witnessed “numerous instances of instrumentalizing
remembrance of Nazi victims for propaganda purposes,” says Christoph Thonfeld,
head of the research department at Dachau. In response, staff historians are
taking steps to preserve the integrity of these recorded memories from
rhetorical manipulation.

Founded on factory grounds in 1933, Dachau was the Nazis’ first concentration
camp, beginning as a detention site for political dissenters before evolving
into a model for all the camps that followed. New SS camp guards trained at
Dachau, which housed an estimated 200,000 prisoners, at least 28,000 of whom
died in the camp and its subcamps, between 1933 and 1945.

Since the former camp’s establishment as a memorial site in 1965, Dachau’s

exhibitions have focused largely on the fate of those imprisoned there. Plans
are underway to permanently incorporate a new show that will examine how SS
officers and Nazi prison guards progressed from prejudice to murder, presenting
the perspective of the perpetrator for the first time in the memorial’s history.

“On the threshold of an age without contemporary witnesses, the focus is on

conveying the history of the concentration camp in a contemporary way,” wrote
the site’s director, Gabriele Hammerman, in a 2021 article. An upcoming
renovation will “fundamentally change” Dachau by opening up spaces previously
inaccessible to the public, including an administrative building where camp
commandant Theodor Eicke capitalized on anti-Semitic and xenophobic thinking as
he trained facilitators of the Nazis’ terror regime. Currently owned by the
Bavarian state police, the commandant’s office building is scheduled to become
part of the Dachau memorial as early as 2025.

The commandant’s office building (in the top right corner) and the
still-standing workshop building (in the middle and on the left) appear in this
photograph of Nazi leaders, including Heinrich Himmler, visiting Dachau in
January 1936.
The commandant’s office building (in the top right corner) and workshop appear
in this photograph of Nazi leaders, including Heinrich Himmler, visiting Dachau
in January 1936. Archive of Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site
The renovation will also open other spaces never before toured by the public,
including a bowling alley and a beer cellar—social rooms integral to the
commandant’s philosophy. “Eicke combined exerting discipline and breaking of
personalities of SS members with a strong sense of camaraderie and paternalism,”
Thonfeld explains. The inclusion of these spaces, he continues, will help
visitors see how a “racist, elite organization” formed its self-image.

Exploring such stories “allows us to go beyond mere externalizing of the SS as

‘evil other,’ which is morally desirable but doesn’t help with the
still-necessary societal confrontation with Nazi cries,” says Thonfeld.
Recognizing all humans’ capacity for evil is a goal similarly embraced by Roth,
the culture minister, who argued in her speech at Flossenbürg that “man and
beast are inseparable. The beast did not assume human form in the Nazi
concentration camps. It lurks in people. It lurks in us.”

Speaking with Smithsonian, Roth says, “Trying to understand what made human
beings do evil” is one way to “open the door to history [and] try to communicate
things that are difficult to explain.” Confronting the past, she continues, is a
way of strengthening democracy: “Putin pretends to ‘de-Nazify’ Ukraine. This
propaganda is absurd, especially regarding its history. Ukraine is defending her
liberty and democracy.”

Flossenbürg, located about 130 miles northwest of Dachau, opened in May 1938 in
a remote area known for its granite quarries. Between 1938 and 1945, the Nazis
imprisoned around 97,000 people from 47 countries at the camp. Harsh conditions,
including forced labor at the quarries, which supplied stone for Nazi
architectural projects, resulted in the deaths of an estimated 30,000 prisoners
across Flossenbürg and its subcamps.

In April 1945, as the United States Army advanced into northern Bavaria, SS
officers at the main Flossenbürg camp rushed to erase evidence of their
operations, mainly by forcing over 9,300 prisoners south toward Dachau on open
freight cars and death marches. When the 90th Infantry Division liberated the
camp on April 23, just 1,500 prisoners remained. As in other camps across
Germany, American soldiers forced civilians to bury the camp’s dead and confront
their own complicity in allowing the Holocaust to happen.

German civilians transport corpses out of Flossenbürg after the camp's

liberation by American forces
German civilians transport corpses out of Flossenbürg after the camp's
liberation by American forces. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Though Flossenbürg held one of the first concentration camp memorials in
Europe—displaced Poles inaugurated a “Valley of Death” honoring Polish and
German clergy victims near the former crematorium on May 25, 1947—authorities
only acknowledged the site’s Nazi history decades later. According to the
memorial’s website, the 1950s saw Germany “repress[ing] recent history in favor
of the integration of persons with a Nazi past.” As the Cold War continued, many
of the horrors of the Holocaust were dismissed by locals, overlooked due to
Germans’ shame over their tacit approval of or outright participation in the
atrocities. It was only in the late 1960s and 1970s, as a new generation came of
age, that West Germany began confronting its not-so-distant history.
On the other side of the Berlin Wall, in East Germany and the rest of the
U.S.S.R., officials ignored Eastern European Holocaust victims’ faith in favor
of presenting a broader narrative of the Nazis’ racially motivated genocide of
ethnic Slavs. This conflation of the Holocaust and the Nazis’ targeting of Slavs
is a key element of the Russian myth of the Great Patriotic War, a nationalist
reading of World War II that paints the conflict as a clash in which righteous
Soviets rescued humanity from the evils of fascism.

“[W]hen you create this narrative of glory against ‘fascism’ and victory, of
pretty much saving the world actually, then these other events [like the
Holocaust] don’t seem so relevant anymore,” Simon Lewis, a cultural historian at
the University of Bremen’s Institute for European Studies in Germany, told
Smithsonian last year. “…They’re a bit of a nuisance to the master narrative of
they, the Nazis, being the bad guys, and [us] defeating them.”

Barracks at Flossenbürg
Barracks at Flossenbürg Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
At Flossenbürg specifically, the erasure of the Holocaust is best represented by
the construction of a housing development on the former camp grounds. As
recently as the 1970s, locals advertised the town that lent the camp its name as
a leisure destination, referring to the actual camp grounds as a place of
“shared history for all war dead.” In 1995, a permanent exhibition finally
replaced a small memorial plaque at the site.

Jörg Skriebeleit, who has served as the Flossenbürg site’s director for the past
25 years, says locals didn’t put up much resistance when the memorial opened
this initial exhibition. In 2007, however, his team received pushback after
debuting a second permanent exhibition that presented the region’s response to
the camp’s history. The culmination of a four-year research project, the show
reflects decades of local dismissiveness to the concentration camp’s history, as
well as the silence that greeted and enabled Nazi activities. It juxtaposes the
camp’s past with an account of the town’s history as a quarry site, residents’
response to Nazi ideology, their interactions with American troops and their
later marketing of Flossenbürg as a location separated from the horrors of the
Holocaust.

A quarry at Flossenbürg
A quarry at Flossenbürg Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Skriebeleit deems the display a “revolutionary” risk because it not only

presented history through survivors’ memories but also underscored the
“deformation and formation of memory and place” that existed in the surrounding
region. Without addressing this culture of silence, the director says, his team
wouldn’t be presenting an accurate history. In addition to preserving the camp’s
landmarks, he sees his job as “opening spaces [where] people [can] look with
different perspectives on what happened.”

On July 14, Berlin-based South African artist Talya Lubinsky will open a
three-month exhibition at Flossenbürg titled “Feldspar, Quartz and Glimmer.” A
sculptural work will symbolically connect the granite quarries to the building
of the town, the propaganda of the Nazis and the misery of the prisoners who
died while lifting rock after rock. Nearby, Lubinsky plans to construct an
installation in front of a defaced mural depicting concentration camp prisoners
laboring in a bucolic countryside setting, their once-smiling faces now
obscured.

The effect, says Skriebeleit, “will show things hidden in plain sight” and
reflect how “history is used and misused for different arguments.”

In the two-month period between February 24, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and
the April 24 commemoration at Flossenbürg, a registered 390,000 Ukrainian
immigrants fled to Germany. Erwin Farkas and Martin Hecht, two of the six
survivors who attended the anniversary event, recalled when an earlier wave of
violence—their deportation by the Nazis—forced them from their childhood homes.
(Though their wartime experiences followed similar trajectories, the pair only
met after the war, at a displaced persons camp.)

Speaking to high school students the day after the commemoration, Farkas and
Hecht described unsanitary conditions in ghettos and train cars, where mothers
protected babies from suffocation; surviving selections when their parents did
not; and marching with frozen feet from camp to camp before arriving at
Flossenbürg in early 1945. Toward the end of the war, the men survived the final
death march to Dachau, a train transport targeted by American aircraft hunting
for Nazis, and an SS shooting massacre at a train station. Finally, they saw
U.S. Army tanks coming over a hill as Nazi guards fled and American troops threw
chocolate bars to the starving prisoners.

Erwin Farkas (right) and his friend Diana Morris-Bauer on the former prisoner
roll call grounds at Flossenbürg
Erwin Farkas (right) and his friend Diana Morris-Bauer on the former prisoner
roll call grounds at Flossenbürg Ferdinand Kauppert

Soldiers led Farkas, then 16, and Hecht, 13, to a monastery in the town of Markt
Indersdorf near Dachau, where they lived at Kloster Indersdorf, an orphanage
established by the United Nations as the first displaced persons camp dedicated
to children. After the commemoration, Farkas and Hecht traveled to this
monastery with Anna Andlauer, a local retired educator and historian who has
spent nearly 20 years finding and reuniting survivors of the refuge, which today
houses a public school.

“I was allowed back in here to be human,” Hecht, now 91, told local reporter
Christiane Breitenberger. “Before, I wasn’t human. [The Nazis] made me a
number.”

Both Hecht and Farkas credit Andlauer with bringing them back to Kloster
Indersdorf and encouraging them to articulate their memories. Pre-pandemic,
anywhere between 10 to 16 survivors would attend the displaced persons camp’s
frequent reunions. This year, only two showed up.

Erwin Farkas speaks to students at the former Kloster Indersdorf.

Erwin Farkas speaks to students at the former Kloster Indersdorf. Ferdinand
Kauppert
Recognizing that they are among the last survivors of the Holocaust, both men
say that those who heed their stories must tell them “when we can’t anymore.”

After meeting with students, they walked a Path of Remembrance, a mile-long

history walk designed by Andlauer that uses storytelling boards and QR codes to
link observers with archival clips that tell the story of Kloster Indersdorf and
its survivors.