Dachau’s Stolen Front Gate Reading ‘Work Makes You Free’ Returned To Site
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
(JTA) — The iron gate of the Dachau Nazi camp, which bears the message “Arbeit macht frei,” or “Work sets you free,” was returned to the site after being stolen more than two years ago.
At a ceremony Wednesday, the gate was welcomed back to Dachau, where a replica was installed since the original was stolen in November 2014.
The replica will remain at the entrance to the camp, now a memorial site, and the original will become part of the memorial’s permanent exhibition. It will be kept inside an air-conditioned glass cabinet equipped with an alarm system, The Associated Press reported, and go on public display for the first time on April 30, the 72nd anniversary of the camp’s liberation.
The gate, approximately 6 feet high, was found under a tarp in a parking lot in December in southwestern Norway following an anonymous tip.
The theft came five years after the 16-foot metal sign from the front gate of the former Auschwitz concentration camp was stolen and recovered across the country 72 hours later cut in three pieces. Repairing the sign took several months.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
