Holocaust remembrance in Jena

Today, on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, the city of Jena commemorates the victims of National Socialist tyranny. The speech given by Lord Mayor Dr. Thomas Nitzsche on 27.01.2025 at the memorial on Hinrichsberg is published here:

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

Since 1996, January 27, the day in 1945 when the Soviet army liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, has been celebrated in Germany as the "Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism". The day is dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Nazi regime: Jews, Christians, Sinti and Roma, people with disabilities, homosexuals, political dissidents as well as men and women of the resistance, scientists, artists, journalists, prisoners of war and deserters, forced laborers.

It is a day of remembrance to commemorate and honor the millions of people who were disenfranchised, persecuted, tortured and murdered under National Socialist tyranny. At the end of 2005, the United Nations General Assembly declared January 27 the "International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust". It has been observed worldwide since 2006.

Commemoration is more important than ever, because many young people no longer know what the Holocaust was, do not know that around six million Jews were murdered. What is even worse is that many decision-makers in business and politics are not aware of their responsibility in this regard.

Next May will mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the end of the National Socialist regime in Germany. At that time, the cruellest war of all time - in terms of the number of victims and the countries and regions of the world involved - came to an end, along with a machinery of extermination against people that was unimaginable up to that point and remains so to this day. On the way to this end was the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp, the camp that has come to epitomize the Holocaust.

80 years after the end of the Second World War, there are very few contemporary witnesses among us who can tell us about their experiences. Even the next generation is getting older, those who heard the stories from their parents or grandparents. The memories and personal connection to the time that brought about the greatest crimes against humanity in history are fading.

At the same time, we are witnessing how historical revisionism, anti-Semitism and the trivialization of Nazi crimes are spreading. For almost three years now, a war has been raging in Europe, in Ukraine, with the aim of ending the free self-determination of a country and shifting borders by force.

It is therefore all the more important that we do not forget what happened in Europe more than 80 years ago and that we use days like today to remember the victims. What happened back then happened to people like you, like you and me, people who came from here. The perpetrators also came from here.

In these days around the turn of the year 1939/40, 85 years ago, the police training battalion 311 was formed in Jena and was stationed in barracks near Jena's Westbahnhof. Volunteers, mostly in their thirties, from all over Germany, including Thuringia and Jena, began their training as police constables.

Everything was "completely harmless for the time being", wrote Peter W., one of the 500 recruits who completed their training in Jena from spring 1940, to his family at the time. Drills, shooting, ideological education with topics such as the Germanic race, subhumanity, Greater Germany, but also good food prepared the police officers for their special task.

As early as mid-October, the battalion was transferred by train to Krakow in the Generalgouvernement. The Jena battalion was seconded to carry out the order of Governor General Hans Frank to make Krakow "free of Jews".

Reinforced by Polish police officers and members of the SS, order no. 10 was implemented.

Walter Danz, commander of the police battalion, had organized the

"Action against local Jews in the city area of Krakow who cannot identify themselves":

"All male Jews who are older than 14 years and do not have a residence permit in their hands are to be arrested. The assembly point for the arrested Jews is the synagogue at the flea market. From there, they are transported to the Lubiczgasse 4 camp by members of the SS Death's Head Regiment."

When the formation of a "Jewish residential district" was ordered in March 1941 and all Jews who had been living outside the district until then had to leave their homes and move into the ghetto, the police battalion, which had meanwhile been distributed across the Krakow district, was involved.

These actions were the prelude to the Holocaust.

With the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 21, 1941, some of the police were deployed together with the fighting troops. The policemen thus became both witnesses and perpetrators of the war of extermination.

In Lviv, Przemyśl, Sambor and other border towns, Ukrainian nationalists carried out pogroms against the Jewish population with German support. Jews were humiliated and beaten to death in the streets. In Lviv, several thousand Jews were deported with the participation of the Jena police battalion and shot near the city. This was confirmed by post-war testimony from police officers.

In the weeks and months that followed, the war of extermination took on unimaginable dimensions. The blood trail of the Jena police battalion for securing the "rear army areas" in the area of Army Corps 17 runs through the Ukraine from Lviv via Tarnopol, Vinnitsa and Uman to Dnipropetrovsk with countless executions of civilians, prisoners of war and partisans, deportations to the Reich and burnt villages.

In her testimony in 1978, Anna Polikarpovna Pavlyuk from the village of Lyutenka near Poltava reported on a shooting in her home village on November 28, 1941. 16 years old at the time, she had narrowly escaped death.

"It was already completely dark at that time, but when we came into the garden, we saw many bodies of people who had been shot, and among them I also saw the bodies of the family of five who had been brought into the garden before us by three German soldiers. The Germans shot at my mother, all three at the same time. I also dropped to the ground and covered my little sister Marusja with my body. At that moment, the Germans shot at me too, but the bullets missed and I heard them hit the ground next to me.

One of the Germans approached me and pushed me away from my little sister. Then he shot at my sister first, my sister kind of gasped, then she fell silent, and then at me.

I could feel that the bullet had injured my left knee, but I didn't let it bother me and stayed lying down as I had been. I didn't see how they shot Tatyana, but I heard the shots. The Germans were shooting at us with machine guns. They didn't fire continuously, though, just a few shots.

After that, the German soldiers came to me again, pushed me with their foot, but I didn't show any signs of life, and a short time later they left the garden.

In the winter of 1941/42, near the city of Dnipropetrovsk, near Novomoskovsk, Police Battalion 311 was deployed together with Wehrmacht units to fight partisan units that had entrenched themselves in the "Black Forest of Samara". In order to cut them off from support and supplies, some of the inhabitants were murdered and houses in 30 villages were destroyed during the harsh winter.

The policeman Emil H. reported a major shooting operation at the end of 1941/beginning of 1942. The village was located about 25 km from Dnipropetrovsk:

As a result of this combing of the forest, about 50 partisans were captured. They were taken to the battalion headquarters for interrogation, where they were questioned by the officers of the headquarters. I would like to say that they were beaten and abused.

After the interrogation, they were shot by a special commando made up of members of the battalion outside the village at a pit they had to dig themselves.

After these 50 partisans had been liquidated, the village was surrounded by the entire 311 Police Battalion. The villagers were then driven out of their homes by a special commando (the size of a platoon). As a result of this round-up, around 200 civilians were rounded up. As far as I can remember today, most of them were women of various ages and older men.

These approximately 200 Soviet citizens were then led in groups of about 30 people to the river and shot. The bodies fell into the river and floated away. Those who did not fall in were pushed into the river by members of the Sonderkommando.

In the summer of 1942, the Jena battalion was transferred to Police Regiment 6. After heavy fighting in the North Caucasus, the unit ceased to exist in January 1943.

From spring 1943, the remnants of the Jena Battalion belonged to Police Regiment 26, one of the most notorious units, which turned parts of Belarus into deserted death zones until the summer of 1944 by shooting men, women and children or burning them alive in barns as "retribution" for partisan resistance.

In August 1943, the "Jenaers" were deployed with the regiment to cordon off and clear the ghetto in Białystok in eastern Poland. The entries in the police officers' service passports read: "Battles with bandits and Jews during the evacuation of the Bialystok ghetto and shock troops behind armored combat vehicles into the ghetto".

The 500 or so Polish resistance fighters were not able to withstand the German superiority for long in the brutal house-to-house fighting - as was later the case in Warsaw. Most of them were shot, only a few managed to escape. 2,000 Jews were killed during the fighting; after selection, over 30,000 Jews were deported either to forced labor camps in Lublin or to the Treblinka and Auschwitz extermination camps, including 1,260 children and 53 caregivers.

Until the 1980s, members of Police Battalion 311 were investigated for war crimes in both German states, in West Germany by public prosecutors, in East Germany by the Ministry for State Security. Not least due to mutually rejected requests for legal assistance, none of the proceedings in East and West against police officers suspected of murder led to an indictment.

Thus, after seven years of investigations, the Stuttgart public prosecutor's office dropped the case against Major Walter Danz in March 1980. The final report of March 4, 1980 states:

During his interrogation as a defendant, Danz firmly denied involvement in unlawful acts of killing to the detriment of Jews, women and children.

Danz had stated in 1976 in an interrogation by the Baden-Württemberg State Criminal Police Office:

'I have also never heard that Jews were shot in our area of operation. I can say that with a clear conscience and repeat it under oath. Police Battalion 311 was never deployed in the shooting of Jews.

The National Socialist regime systematically pursued the goal of the complete extermination of the Jewish people. According to the plans of the Wannsee Conference of 1942, a total of 11 million people were to die. In the end, the number of Jewish victims amounted to around 5.6 to 6.3 million murdered people. An unimaginable number, roughly equal to the combined population of Thuringia and Saxony.

Added to this are hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish victims.

Stumbling stones have been laid in our town since 2007 and there are now 65 of them. They commemorate Jewish and other citizens of this city who were victims of National Socialism.

Initiatives and individuals are working to come to terms with Jena's past during the National Socialist era and to raise awareness of this in the city. By way of example, I would like to mention Frank Döbert, who researched the information presented here about Jena's Police Battalion 311 and who died far too early last spring.

The commemoration of the victims of National Socialism must always include the question of what responsibility we derive from the experiences of our ancestors and from the crimes of the Nazi regime.

In addition to researching the biographies of the victims and the direct perpetrators, we must also look at urban society in general and in Jena in particular. How was it possible for a society to support the crimes described? How did the administration function during the Nazi era? Who contributed to its functioning and how? What can we deduce from this for our commitment and our political actions in the present?

We are far from finished here. Year after year, we are confronted with new findings, such as the research by Frank Döbert that I am drawing on today.

Ladies and gentlemen,

80 years after Auschwitz, anti-Semitism is once again so widespread and so obvious in Germany that Jews feel unsafe or even afraid to openly profess their faith and show it in everyday life.

Even the war in the Middle East and a critical attitude towards the actions of the Israeli government are in no way a justification for anti-Semitism. There is no acceptable justification for anti-Semitism, neither here nor anywhere else.

There is still a need for commitment to ensure that the events and crimes of National Socialism and the Second World War are not forgotten. Efforts and awareness are still needed to ensure that we stand up for human rights and human dignity in our daily actions. They are the basis for the peaceful coexistence of mankind. Let us act together here!

Thank you for coming today.

Am Denkmal am Hinrichsberg versammelten sich am 27.01.2025 Menschen zum Gedenken an die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus

© Stadt Jena