German children tired of the holocaust

German youth are experiencing "Holocaust fatigue," the head of the German delegation to an international organization of Holocaust education and remembrance said Monday.

"German children tend to show Holocaust fatigue," said Dr. Benedikt Haller, the German Foreign Ministry official who serves as special representative for relations with Jewish organizations and issues relating to anti-Semitism.

The remarks came just a day before the official opening in Berlin of the office of the Task Force on International Cooperation on Holocaust Education Remembrance and Research, a group intended to foster cooperation on Holocaust remembrance activities throughout Europe. The organization, which was conceived a decade ago and has thus far operated informally, will comprise 25 countries around the world, including EU states, the US, Argentina and Israel.

In remarks to a group of Israeli journalists, Holocaust instructors and American Jewish leaders, Haller, who will serve as the head of the German delegation to the international Holocaust body, stressed that "Holocaust fatigue" was not a reason to stop teaching the Holocaust in German schools.

"The Holocaust has a very strong place in our national curriculum and it is not going away or [being taken] out," he said. "This is not a reason to take it out of our curriculum."

Haller attributed the "over-infusion" of Holocaust education to a new generation of German educators who revolted against the generation of their parents and grandparents who had kept silent about the mass murder of six million Jews.

"A whole generation of teachers were interested in refuting their parents and telling people the truth," he said.

"It's quite natural that the commitment was not the same with their students [which] for them was a strange and brutal story of [their] grandparents," he said.

The German official suggested that in their zeal to teach the story of the Holocaust, some teachers of the "committed" generation "overdid it a little." Haller made his frank statements after noting the "tremendous amount" of Holocaust literature and research in Germany which, he said, he has long given up trying to keep up with.

He cited a German newspaper caricature published on the 60th anniversary of Hitler's rise to power that depicted a German in a bookstore, surrounded and oversaturated with books about the Holocaust.

The official's remarks were later criticized by American educators as inappropriate.

"As spokesman for such an elite group in Europe as the task force, he has to be at the forefront of encouraging Holocaust remembrance, and not discouraging it," said Bernita M. King, history professor at Miami Dade College. "He should be the biggest cheerleader of Holocaust remembrance," King said.

"This is the wrong message to send out when there is so much more work that needs to be done," said Susan Myers, the executive director of the Holocaust Museum Houston. "With anti-Semitism on the rise, this is not the time to slow down," she said.

Haller's remarks come as the number of elderly Holocaust survivors continues to dwindle.

"This is not the message that you want survivors to hear as they are in their twilight years," Myers said.

"As the child of a survivor, it is perplexing to hear that there is a fatigue not only about the Holocaust but about anti-Semitism," said Sylvia Wygoda, executive director of the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust.

A representative of the New York-based American Jewish Committee, Los Angeles Chapter Executive Director Seth Brysk, said that Haller was "reporting on a phenomenon that exists in the country."

"There is evidence... which indicates that there is Holocaust fatigue in Germany, but it's unclear to what extent," William Shulman, president of the New York-based Association of Holocaust Organizations and a member of the US delegation to the task force, said in a telephone interview.

Other German educators said that German teens were highly informed about the Holocaust, but stopped short of saying they were "oversaturated" with Holocaust education.

"Many come with the attitude 'we know already everything,'" said Dr. Norbert Kampe, director of the Memorial and Educational Site at the House of the Wannsee Conference, a lavish villa in suburban Berlin where top SS officials met in January 1942 to discuss the extermination of the Jews.

The inauguration of the new Holocaust memorial office on Tuesday will be marked by an address by German Federal Foreign Minister Dr. Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

"It is quite fitting that the office should open in Berlin, the place where the Holocaust was planned and executed," Haller said. "This is an important step for Holocaust commemoration in the future."

Holocaust "Surviver" Admits Story is a Fraud.

A woman's best-selling account of how she lost her parents to the Holocaust and survived by living with wolves in the forests of Europe has been exposed as a fabrication.



"Surviving with Wolves", first published 11 years ago, has been translated into 18 languages and was recently turned into a film.

But in a statement issued by her lawyers, Misha Defonseca, who was born Monique De Wael, confessed that while her parents, members of Belgium's resistance, were killed by the Nazis her family was not Jewish and most of the events of the book were made up.

"Ever since I can remember, I felt Jewish," she said. "There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world. The story in the book is mine. It is not the actual reality - it was my reality, my way of surviving."

"At first, I did not want to publish it, but then I was convinced. I ask for forgiveness for all those who feel betrayed but I ask them to put themselves in the place of a small girl of four years old who has lost everything and who has to survive."

In her book, Mrs Defonseca describes being taken in by the De Wael family as a young girl.


"She was given a new name, a new home, and forced into a new religion," claims publicity for her book.

Knowing only that her parents had "gone East", the young Misha sets out to find them equipped only with a tiny compass.

After crossing Belgium, Germany and Poland alone on foot, close to starvation in a vast forest, she was adopted by a family of wolves.

Mrs Defonseca's book became a runaway bestseller after its publication in Italy and France and has made her a millionaire.

But suspicions were aroused in Belgium's Jewish community and some of her old school friends from the Anderlecht district of Brussels recognised her.

They insisted that she was born and raised a Catholic by the De Wael family and lived with her grandfather after her parents were deported.

"She belonged to a very good family and lived in the most beautiful house on the street," one former friend told La Meuse newspaper.

"Monique was always 'special'. She wanted to be the 'star' where ever she went."

Despite growing evidence in recent weeks of inconsistencies in her story, including a birth certificate showing she was not Jewish, Mrs Donfonseca insisted she was telling the truth until she released her statement.

At the film's premiere in France last month she even turned up with a little compass, "my most precious talisman", which she said had helped her find her way on her journey east through the forests of occupied Europe.

Vera Belmont, the director of the French film "Survivre avec les Loups" has taken the revelations well.

Her spokeswoman said: "The movie is a fiction from the book. No matter if it's true or not - she believes it is, anyway - she just thinks it's a beautiful story."

Jane Daniel, the publisher Mrs Defonseca claims persuaded her to write the book, is less forgiving after being sued by the author in a breach of contract case for £11 million.

She now intends to challenge the judgment on the grounds that Mrs Defonseca's original contract had warranted the truth of the story.

Understanding Anti-Semitism

NPD boycotts Jewish memorial

BERLIN - Members of a far-right German party boycotted a moment of silence at a state parliament held in honor of Nazi victims Wednesday, the 75th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's elevation to German chancellor.
ADVERTISEMENT

The six lawmakers of the far-right National Democratic Party from the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania refused to rise from their seats during a moment of silence.

Lawmakers from other parties said they were disgusted with the boycott, causing the parliamentary session to be temporarily interrupted.

The NPD leader for the state said his party was not willing to participate in a memorial that only honored victims of the Nazis and not Germans who died as well.

Hitler's accession to chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, gave the Nazi party its "in" to eventually consolidate absolute control over the country in the months soon after, setting it on the path to World War II and the Holocaust that left millions of people dead.

The day is not largely marked in Germany, although schools planned extra lessons on the event nationwide.

Ernst Zundel: CNN 1985