Never Again Is Now Bamberg

In the German town of Bamberg, the chairman of the Jewish Community is attacked for his speech on November 9, 2022 to commemorate the Reich Pogrom Night.

When a chairman of a Jewish community in Germany takes the floor on November 9, it may be difficult for some listeners to bear. This is evidently the case in Bamberg, where the chairman of the Jewish Community, Martin Arieh Rudolph, has now been accused by an “action alliance against the right” of having "missed the point and misused the commemorative speech" with his speech on November 9, 2022. For November 9 was “an important day for the culture of remembrance, on which the commemoration of the victims and the behavior of the perpetrators had to be the focus” and not a “personal reckoning with the federal government.” The speaker had dared to include the Corona measures in the considerations of his speech. Critics should have watched Vera Sharav's documentary beforehand.

The speech was given to commemorate the Reich Pogrom Night on November 9, 1938, in which Jewish stores were looted, synagogues destroyed, and Jews abused and killed throughout Germany. This day was the preliminary climax of an initially seemingly gradual, later expedited exclusion, persecution and finally extermination of Jews in Germany starting with the election of Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor and the Gleichschaltung of civil institutions that followed after the Reichstag fire. A good three years after the Pogrom Night, the Final Solution was decided in January 1942, the industrially organized exploitation and extermination of Jews (and other minorities) in the extermination camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek. The name commonly used for this, at least since 1979 (and the reporting at that time by a commission chaired by Auschwitz Survivor Elie Wiesel), is Holocaust.

Criticism of Covid policies is Holocaust denial, or at least relativization. This is what the head of the Nuremberg Institute for Nazi Research and Jewish History, Jim G. Tobias, meant when he reported Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav to the public prosecutor's office in August 2022 after her speech at the ceremony marking 75 years of the Nuremberg Code. Just how oblivious to history and dangerously wrong both Tobias and now the critics of the 1st chairman of the Jewish Community in Bamberg are becomes clear when one takes the culture of remembrance back to its core, which in Germany (and elsewhere) is in danger of withering away into a ritualized retrospective. 

Remembering the Holocaust

Preventing the repetition of the Holocaust is the goal of a speech on November 9, one of those fateful days in the calendar of remembrance to which, not least, the previously mentioned commission of Elie Wiesel devoted special attention. However, Wiesel said on behalf of his commission in his accompanying letter to U.S. President Jimmy Carter, the question of what form commemoration should take is of the greatest importance:

“The question of how to remember makes up the bulk of the Commission's report. Memorial, museum, education, research, commemoration, action to prevent a recurrence: these are our areas of concern.”

“Action to prevent a recurrence.” Under this the commission subsumed not least such speeches as must be made on every November 9, on every January 27, and on many other days of remembrance.

On these days and in these speeches, according to Wiesel's commission, the remembrance of the dead is of course called for. Because:

“First, we cannot grant the killers a posthumous victory. Not only did they humiliate and assassinate their victims, they wanted also to destroy their memory. They killed them twice, reducing them to ashes and then; denying their deed. Not to remember the dead now would mean to become accomplices to their murderers.”

The remembrance was the wish of the victims themselves, it continues. One should not, secondly, ...

“... deny the victims the fulfillment of their last wish; their idee fixe to bear witness. What the merchant from Saloniki, the child from Lodz, the rabbi from Radzimin, the carpenter from Warsaw and the scribe from Vilna had in common was the passion, the compulsion to tell the tale--or to enable someone else to do so. Every ghetto had its historians, every deathcamp its chroniclers. Young and old, learned and unlearned, everybody kept diaries, wrote journals, composed poems and prayers. They wanted to remember and to be remembered. They wanted to defeat the enemy's conspiracy of silence, to communicate a spark of the fire that nearly consumed their generation, and, above all, to serve as warning to future generations. Instead of looking with contempt upon mankind that betrayed them, the victims dreamed of redeeming it with their own charred souls. Instead of despairing of man and his possible salvation, they put their faith in him. Defying all logic, all reason, they opted for humanity and chose to try, by means of their testimony, to save it from indifference that might result in the ultimate catastrophe (…)”

Accordingly, it is without any doubt a matter of raising people’s awareness. Indifference is the real danger, Wiesel, who was the world’s leading spokesman on the Holocaust, and his colleagues urged the U.S. President as well as the world public:

“Third, we must remember for our own sake, for the sake of our own humanity. Indifference to the victims would result, inevitably, in indifference to ourselves, an indifference that would ultimately no longer be sin but, in the words of our Commissioner Bayard Rustin, ‘a terrifying curse’ and its own punishment.”

In Bamberg, Martin Arieh Rudolph, the first chairman of the Israelite Community, in an address (so far known only summarily from what was reported by two media outlets in possession of the speech) did exactly what Marian Turski had described as an unrelenting task in his speech on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp: to resolutely oppose indifference to violations of civil and human rights - no matter how small - through protest. Not only had Auschwitz not fallen from the sky, Turski said at the time, but it could happen again if people met violations of fundamental rights against minorities with indifference:

»The essence of democracy lies in the rule of the majority. But democracy itself lies in the fact that the rights of minorities must be protected. Don’t be complacent, whenever any government violates already existing, common social contracts. Remain faithful to the Eleventh Commandment: Never be a bystander. Because, if you become complacent, before you know it, some kind of Auschwitz will suddenly appear from nowhere, and befall you and your descendants.«
— Marian Turski, Auschwitz, January 27, 2020

Rudolph recognized the contours of an “iceberg of contempt for humanity” in the measures that have since been widely recognized as excessive, because fundamental rights such as freedom of religion and the right to bodily integrity had been restricted. This statement on November 9, 2022, is now being held against Rudolph by self-appointed “fighters against anti-Semitism” not only as a “personal reckoning with the federal government,” but also as damage to the interests of the Jewish community.

Don't the critics realize how they threaten to expose themselves to the accusation of anti-Semitism when they interfere in the internal affairs of the Jewish community? When they make stipulations about what serves the Jewish cause and what doesn’t?

They don't realize it, as a conversation with one of the signers of the letter to Mr. Rudolph reveals. In the letter, the lady signing “Andrea” prides herself with “many years of experience in remembrance work and in the fight against the right.” However, she knows neither the speech of Marian Turski from January 27, 2020, nor the report of the Presidential Commission. However, in the telephone conversation, which lasted a total of 17 minutes, she attaches great importance to organizing “commemorative events of our own on every January 27.” It is impossible to know every speech, the lady said, who altogether confirms an impression quite sincerely striving to do the right thing, but ultimately grossly unreflective.

A glance at the text of Elie Wiesel’s Commission could have made it clear to her that all survivors (including Marian Turski, as well as Vera Sharav) are aware that the warning of conditions similar to those at the beginning of the Nazi era cannot be a relativization of the Holocaust. Rather, they are necessary benchmarks for the early detection of totalitarian developments which could, ultimately, lead to ultimate catastrophes such as those which happened in the industrially organized extermination camps.

“In the beginning [the Nazis] made one move and waited. Only when there was no reaction did they make another move and still another. From racial laws to medieval decrees, from illegal expulsions to the establishment of ghettos and then to the invention of deathcamps, the killers carried out their plans only when they realized that the outside world simply did not care about the Jewish victims. Soon after, they decided they could do the same thing, with equal impunity, to other peoples as well. As always, they began with Jews. As always, they did not stop with Jews alone.”

Author Edwin Black has pointed out several times (most recently at the conclusion of Part 1 of Vera Sharav's documentary) that the technological development of the time (and the support provided by making technology available through partners in business and industry) was an important contributor to the scale of the Holocaust. Wiesel's commission pointed to the role of technological progress in making a nuclear holocaust a real possibility and a common concept by the late 1970s. He did not face any accusation of relativization or denial. Quite the contrary. But Wiesel was also unaware of today's possibilities of genetics and biotechnology. Nor is it known that he was aware of the continuities of the promoters of Nazi and transhumanist ideas of modernity that shape biotechnology today. Vera Sharav is aware of these continuities. And that is what lends credibility as well as justification to her warning .

What makes particularly dangerous the criticism of courageous speakers like Martin Arieh Rudolph, and also of critics of the Covid-Policies (whose “anti-democratic, racist and anti-Semitic positions” Mr. Rudolph must have known, his critics profess) is the othering, the exclusion, to which today's fighters against the right see themselves entitled. It is dangerous because this exclusion corresponds exactly to the pattern of the Nazis, with which they tried to break criticism and resistance. Wiesel warns:

“Auschwitz was possible because the enemy of the Jewish people and of mankind--and it is always the same enemy--succeeded in dividing, in separating, in splitting human society, nation against nation, Christian against Jew, young against old. And not enough people cared. In Germany and other occupied countries, most spectators chose not to interfere with the killers; in other lands, too, many persons chose to remain neutral. As a result, the killers killed, the victims died, and the world remained world.”

Those who label legitimate and factual criticism of excessive measures as anti-Semitic, anti-democratic or extreme right-wing are engaging in the kind of division that benefits the fascist and anti-human forces that survived the downfall of the Nazi regime! But who deligitimizes warnings of Holocaust survivors commits a sacrilege!