Barracks at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial have been smeared with anti-Semitic slogans. Recordings from surveillance cameras are evaluated by the police.
Warsaw – Several historical buildings of the Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial have been smeared with anti-Semitic slogans. The memorial made the incident public on Tuesday on Twitter.
It is a “hideous attack on the symbol of one of the greatest tragedies in human history and an extremely painful blow to the memory of all the victims” who died in Germany’s largest extermination camp in World War II.
Nine wooden barracks were sprayed with slogans in English and German, it said. Some of them refer to passages from the Bible that are often quoted by anti-Semites, others deny the Holocaust, i.e. the systematic murder of millions of Jews by the National Socialists.
Statement concerning the vandalism that took place on October 5 at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau site. pic.twitter.com/bsNepIRCcL
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) October 5, 2021
The police had been turned on, recordings from surveillance cameras were evaluated and the graffiti were graphologically examined before removal, the memorial said.
The head of the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem, Dani Dajan, condemned the act on Wednesday as “willful vandalism”. It is an attack “not only on the memory of the victims, but also on the survivors and every person with a conscience”. More should be done to raise public awareness of the Holocaust issue and to educate the younger generation about the dangers of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
The name Auschwitz has become a synonym for the Holocaust and the epitome of evil. In the German extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau alone – about 70 kilometers from Krakow – the Nazis killed more than a million people, mostly Jews. All over Europe they murdered around six million Jews during the Shoah. dpa
