We have been taught that the Holocaust was a singular act of evil. So evil, in fact, that it could only have been carried out by monsters.
Caricature nazis have plagued popular media for decades, depicted as uniquely evil, almost like machines. But we all know in reality, they were mostly regular people. Your neighbor, teacher or accountant. They were more like the non-prisoner extras in The Zone of Interest.
Popular Western culture portrays as unique heroes those that stood up and did the right thing in the 1930s, from the Scholl siblings to Schindler. The movie Schindler’s List is, however, as much the story of one businessman who helped those in need as it is the story of thousands of companies and individuals that could have helped but did not, of those who chose profit and quiet instead. Capitalism kills.
We have been taught that the Nazi regime’s power was held by few individuals and groups, and that once they were gone, the problem was largely solved. In reality, the power resided in structures rather than individuals—power structures fueled by the fortunes of capitalists who themselves, in turn, profited from tyranny and war. The moguls and enterprises from back then were allowed to largely retain their ill-gotten war profits and are today some of the richest and most powerful companies and families in this country.
Today we see again the richest people on earth backing up authoritarian regimes and profiting from war and genocide, from Palestine to Congo to Sudan to Western Sahara.
These power structures of the last century were based in racist, white supremacist ideology that dehumanized Jews, Sinti and Roma and Slavic people.
Today, the West dehumanises the majority of the world’s peoples. We expel the ones undesirable to our regimes, close down borders and pay other countries to do our dirty work.
This dehumanization is broadcasted daily in our mainstream media. It is painfully patent in the covering of the genocide in Gaza. Palestinians are rarely worth talking about and are mainly referred to as terrorists. Articles, comments and tweets referring to them as human animals are common and still today remain unpunished. At the same time we are criminalized for shouting ‘Free Palestine’.
We have been taught nazism came from almost nowhere and that as soon as the most prominent nazis were gone, Germany was denazified. We could not have been more lied to. They are back and as racist and fearmongering as ever. In fact, they never left.
Conditions for revolutions and dictatorships develop first slowly, and then there they are all at once. We can see this in the last century’s Germany, how it descended day by day into nazism, culminating in war and the Holocaust. Today, we see it in the devastating genocide being perpetrated in Palestine. 76 years of occupation, apartheid and slow genocidal practices are now manifesting all at once in one of the worst atrocities of this century.
And again, we have the perpetrators and cheerleaders among us. We have them in our university presidiums, our media, our clubs and in the parliament. Germany is once again rotten with genocidal, racist and fascist mania, while most look the other way and criticize those who dare to break their peace of mind.
Back then they used print media to push their genocidal views, now they have both the media and the algorithms. Back then they had Henry Ford, today they have Musk. Back then people didn’t know, today “it´s complicated”. Shame shit almost a 100 years later.
Being in this square is extremely symbolic, not only because of Heinrich Heine’s words, “those who burn books will at the end burn people” written here, with which he tried to warn of the insidiously growing 19th century antisemitism. He ended up summarizing what was to come—both 80 years ago in Europe and the scholasticide and genocide in Gaza today.
It is also symbolic for its empty monument, both literally empty and devoid of meaning.
As HP Loveshaft said in a beautiful speech back in 2023, some of the first books to burn here were the works of Magnus Hirschfeld, a German-Jewish physician, sexologist, multidisciplinary scholar and women’s and LGTBQ rights advocate, whose German citizenship was promptly revoked by the nazis (eerily familiar). Along with his personal work, the nazis burned the books in Hirschfield’s Institute for Sexual Science library. As HP suggested, this monument would have been a lot more meaningful if instead of void space they would have erected a library with all the books from the Institute’s Library that had been burned.
Maybe, had we read more, instead of having pretended to atone from the past with empty words, gestures and monuments, we would not have to be here again having to assert that never again means never again for anyone, anywhere.
Free Palestine.
‘When I think of Germany at night, / Then I am deprived of sleep”
These words by Heinrich Heine from 1844 seemed like an evil premonition, because incredible horrors and atrocities were to follow from this Germany:
The colonial campaign of annihilation against the Maji Maji of 1905-1907 in present-day Tanzania, with up to 300,000 dead. The genocide of the Herero and Nama 1904-1908 in present-day Namibia. As an ally of Turkey the genocide of the Armenians 1915-1923. And then towards the middle of the 20th century, the genocide of 500,000 Sinti and Roma, whom they themselves call Samudaripen, and the Holocaust of 6 million European Jews, who met their end in the concentration and extermination camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmo, Maidanek and Auschwitz. Not to forget all the others persecuted and murdered by the fascist criminal regime: Communists, anarchists, Christians, queers, homeless people, people with disabilities, Black people, dissidents and many more.
On 19 April 1945, 21,000 surviving prisoners of Buchenwald concentration camp took the Oath of Buchenwald on the roll call square:
‘We shall only stop fighting when the last culprit stands before the judges of the nations. The destruction of Nazism with its roots is our slogan. Building a new world of peace and freedom is our goal.’
From this oath, the much-cited Never Again was born. Intervene, don’t look away, take responsibility should actually be the conclusion today.
But humanity has learned nothing from history after 1945, its memory of endured suffering is astonishingly short: countless wars, crimes and genocides committed by human hands: from the massacre by the French military on 8 May 1945 in the Algerian towns of Setif and Guelma, to the US-American napalm bombing of Vietnam, to the genocides in Rwanda (1994), Srebrenica (1995), the Yazidis in Iraq or the Rohingya in Myanmar (to name just a few examples), and now – the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
And those who remain silent consent. This applies as much today as it did yesterday.
Germany has also learned nothing from its own history, because it sends its weapons to Israel, which then kills people in Gaza. If Auschwitz is to be a warning and a lesson for the future and if indifference to suffering and misery is not to become the norm, then we are raising our voices now to no longer tolerate these injustices and indignities, of which no one can claim to have known nothing.
And we support those who fight for their liberation – in Kurdistan, Western Sahara, Sudan, Palestine and everywhere.
It is up to us, the still living, to end the atrocities of humanity and to stand up for a society and world in which all people can live in dignity and freedom.
Never Again for us means Never Again for everyone, everywhere.
No Power to Nobody
Thank you
