This is the Forward’s coverage of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp in Poland run by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Auschwitz-Birkenau
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Fast Forward Brothers Who Survived Auschwitz Barred From Joining Suit Against Nazi Medic
BERLIN (JTA) — A judge in Germany has barred two Jewish brothers from Boulder, Colorado, from being co-plaintiffs in an accessory to murder trial against 96-year-old former Auschwitz SS medic Hubert Zafke. Chief Judge Klaus Kabisch in the Neubrandenburg state court explained on Tuesday that brothers Walter and William Plywaski – themselves Auschwitz survivors – could not join the trial because…
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Fast Forward Auschwitz Promises Anonymity to Nazi Descendants in Return for Documents
Corrects to show that the museum is offering anonymity to the descendants of Auschwitz staff, not the staff themselves, whose names are already public. The Auschwitz Museum is asking Germans and Austrians to donate Nazi documents about the death camp and it’s making a big concession in return. It’s promising to grant the donors anonymity…
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Culture Is This Sugarcane Plantation ‘America’s Auschwitz’?
The April issue of Smithsonian magazine featured a piece entitled “Inside America’s Auschwitz,” on the Whitney Plantation as “a rebuke – and an antidote to our sanitized history of slavery.” I came across this piece online, and I was drawn to the provocative headline as well as the setting, a town less than an hour…
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Opinion Arrive at Auschwitz a Tourist, Leave As a Traveler
My 2013 edition of Lonely Planet’s “Europe on a Shoestring” ranks Auschwitz third in “Poland Highlights” — trailing behind the gnome statues of the city of Wrocław, but ahead of the city of Gdańsk. As a Holocaust historian and architectural historian of Auschwitz, I have visited the death camp at least 80 times since my…
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Opinion How I Came To Grips With My Bias Against Poles — on Visit to Auschwitz
OSWIECIM, Poland (JTA) — I did a shameful thing on my first visit 20 years ago to the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In a guestbook outside an Auschwitz museum exhibit featuring information on 70,000 Polish non-Jews who were murdered here, I downplayed the significance of their deaths by writing: “Your pain is no credential here,…
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Opinion Can Auschwitz Be a Graveyard and a Tourist Destination?
Menachem Rosensaft once wrote that “as much as any other event, if not more so, the Holocaust requires the chronicler to be scrupulously accurate.” He further notes that “the greater the popularity of this subject, the greater the need for vigilance regarding the treatment it is accorded.” As we approach International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we…
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Opinion How Auschwitz Can Be Both a Memorial and a Center for Education
How should we define the authentic remains of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, which today are protected and preserved by the Auschwitz Memorial? Should we define it as: 150 buildings, about 300 ruins, including those of five gas chambers and four crematoria in Birkenau that are especially important to the history of…
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Fast Forward Auschwitz Museum Appeals for SS Staff Documents
WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — The director of Auschwitz –Birkenau Museum has appealed to Germans and Austrians to donate documents, photographs, personal letters, or any other materials related to the SS staff of the camp. “Without a comprehensive analysis and understanding of the motivation and mentality of the perpetrators, our efforts to wisely counsel future generations…
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