Sign that spanned entrance to former Nazi death camp in Poland removed overnightThe iron sign bearing the Nazi slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei" that spanned the main entrance to the former Auschwitz death camp was stolen before dawn today, Polish police said. The sign with the German words for "Work Sets You Free" is believed to have been stolen from the gates of the Auschwitz memorial between 3.30am and 5am, when museum guards noticed it was missing and alerted authorities, said a police spokeswoman, Katarzyna Padlo.
The five-metre-long, 40kg sign across a gate at the main entrance to the former Nazi death camp in southern Poland, where more than 1 million people died during the second world war, was unscrewed on one side and pulled off on the other, Padlo said. A spokesman for the Auschwitz museum, Pawel Sawicki, called the theft a "desecration" and said it was shocking that the tragic history of the site did not stop the thieves. In Brussels, the European parliament president, Jerry Burzek, appealed for the sign to be returned "out of respect for the suffering of over a million victims".
Another museum spokesman, Jaroslaw Mensfelt, said the thieves carried the sign 300 metres to an opening in a barbed-wire gap in a concrete wall. The opening had been left intentionally to preserve a poplar tree dating back to the time of the war.
Fifty criminal investigators and a sniffer dog were sent to the grounds of the vast former death camp, where barracks, watchtowers and the ruins of gas chambers stand as testament to the atrocities inflicted by Nazi Germany on Jews, Gypsies and others. The sniffer dog led police to a spot outside the wall where the sign left an imprint in freshly fallen snow, then to a roadside where the sign appeared to have been loaded on to a getaway vehicle. A 5,000-zloty (£1,000) reward has been offered to anyone who can help track down the perpetrators.
Padlo said there were no suspects but police were pursuing several theories. Another police spokesman told TVP Info television: "The whole area is under surveillance. There are many cameras there. We are now analysing the film. I hope we will find the trail."
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance centre in Jerusalem, told Reuters the theft was "an attack on the memory of the Holocaust". Noach Flug, president of the International Auschwitz Committee in Jerusalem, said it "deeply unsettles the survivors" and the sign "has to be found".
Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said the thieves were guilty of desecrating a site of immense importance.
"If they are pranksters, they'd have to be sick pranksters, or someone with a political agenda. But whoever has done it has desecrated world memory," he said. "Auschwitz has to stand intact because without it, we are without the world's greatest physical reminder of what we are capable of doing to each other."
Sawicki said the museum authorities had already replaced the sign with a replica, which was used briefly a few years ago when the original was being repaired.
The original sign was made in the summer of 1940 by non-Jewish Polish inmates of Auschwitz in an iron workshop at the camp. After occupying Poland in 1939, the Nazis established the Auschwitz I camp in the southern Polish city of Oswiecim and initially used it for German political prisoners and non-Jewish Polish prisoners.
"We believe that the perpetrators will be found soon and the inscription will be returned to its place," said Sawicki.
The slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei" was used at the entrances to other Nazi camps, including Dachau and Sachsenhausen, but the long, curving sign at Auschwitz is perhaps the best known. More than a million people visit the Auschwitz site every year, but the barracks and other structures are in a state of disrepair and Polish authorities have been struggling to find the funds to carry out conservation work. This week, Germany pledged €60m to an endowment that will fund long-term preservation work – half the amount that Auschwitz memorial museum officials say is needed.
Guardian
10 comments:
In the 80's BNP activists would be forever stealing the "Mandela Way SE1" street sign in Southwark and raffling them for party funds.
While that and this incident aren't comparable in terms of gravity (although both are illegal), I suspect that a similar Polish fascist group could be behind this act of desecration.
I know a lot of people think Auschwitz should be kept as a memorial and example of man's inhumaity to man but I'd personally like to see the place entirely destroyed. That dreadful gateway must be engraved on the minds of the few survivors left and the horrors it represents will reverberate through history without the gateway or the buildings remaining. There's no need for it and its continued existence is a blight on humankind. Let them come and steal the whole thing, let it all be dispersed and let's consign it to the history books where it and the events surrounding it rightly belong.
If that were to happen, Holocaust deniers would claim destruction of evidence that gas chambers didn't exist.
'If that were to happen, Holocaust deniers would claim destruction of evidence that gas chambers didn't exist.'
They claim that anyway - or that they were built after the war or that they were actually delousing chambers or whatever. Holocaust deniers will continue to deny whether the evidence and witness testimony is there or not.
"I know a lot of people think Auschwitz should be kept as a memorial and example of man's inhumaity to man but I'd personally like to see the place entirely destroyed. That dreadful gateway must be engraved on the minds of the few survivors left and the horrors it represents will reverberate through history without the gateway or the buildings remaining. There's no need for it and its continued existence is a blight on humankind. Let them come and steal the whole thing, let it all be dispersed and let's consign it to the history books where it and the events surrounding it rightly belong."
Well said.
"They claim that anyway - or that they were built after the war or that they were actually delousing chambers or whatever. Holocaust deniers will continue to deny whether the evidence and witness testimony is there or not."
And that too.
SECRET BNP MEETING IN CRAWLEY LAST NIGHT.
The upper echelons of the BNP held a secret meeting in Crawley last night to make a major amendment to their constitution prior to the next general election.
"As you are all aware" roared Griffin, "Muslims are giving birth at five times the rate of White English people and this needs to be stopped.
After a thunderous applause the crowd cried for some solutions
"How can we stop them? yelled a member
Its islamification that's what it is innit" cried another.
"Those bloody Muslims and their Sharia law says they have to have nine babies each" shouted a drunk man in the corner.
Gentlemen, Gentlemen, and the two ladies present" Griffin sniggered. " I have the solution, and it will be part of our next manifesto".
The crowd of 12 all stood at once for a standing ovation, unable to contain their excitement they yelled Griffin's name in unison despite not yet hearing his solution.
"What the BNP propose to do" Griffin continued, "is to provide, free of charge to every white man, a years supply of Viagra to help them in their duty to bear more white children.
Silence engulfed the room.
"What is wrong with you lot?" asked Collett. "Don't you realise that we will be a minority in our own country in 20 years and the BNP needs some "upstanding "nationalists.
The quiet snigger's went right over Colletts head
"This sounds like a good idea" interjected Lee barnes LLb Hons the BNP legal eagle."But I am not sure about the legality of it. If we are talking one Viagra tablet or two hundred Viagra tablets I couldn't get it to stand up in court".
The legal maestro was oblivious to the quiet snigger's from the two female members
"What that gob shite needs" said Barmbrook pointing at Griffin, "is a bigger member not a bigger membership"
Everyone was amazed by Barmbrooks superior intellect and tried to join him at the bar
Strange how this never happened until Nick Griffin got to europe.
Holocaust Denial has no historical content or validity. I have read a few Holocaust Denial texts ('know your enemy' and all that) and they all, without exception, mold and skewer facts and events to fit a pre-determined outcome. It is purely a form of anti-Semitism under another guise.
"It is purely a form of anti-Semitism under another guise."
Of course it is. This can be easily proven by the fact that there isn't a single website devoted to such 'revisionism'-- not one-- that isn't tainted by a wealth of polemics directed towards Jews that have nothing whatever to do with the Final Solution.
@irishtony
lol!
since when you been attending BNP meetings?
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