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DW
16-05-2025
- Politics
- DW
Roma Resistance Day: From Nazi era to present day – DW – 05/16/2025
On May 16, Sinti and Roma across Europe commemorate the resistance against National Socialism and the Nazi genocide. They are still fighting against antiziganism today. Looking back at his childhood, Holocaust survivor Mano Höllenreiner recalled how his father, his uncles and other Sinti and Roma joined forces to fight to the death against the SS paramilitary Nazi organization in 1944 inside the Auschwitz extermination camp. Höllenreiner was only 10 years old at the time, and he later spoke about the men in his family: "They had been in the military, they weren't afraid." Together, they defended themselves against imminent transportation to the gas chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. In the camp, they and their families suffered from hunger, thirst, cold, disease, brutal violence and unbearable hygiene conditions in the so-called "gypsy camp." The children were the first to die. A memory of the carefree time before deportation to Auschwitz: Mano Höllenreiner (left) with his father and his sister Lilly Image: privat Auschwitz 1944: Resistance under unbearable conditions After they received a warning about a major SS operation, the prisoners armed themselves with stones, sticks and shovels they had been able to smuggle into their barracks from their forced labor sites. They entrenched themselves behind the entrance, ready to fight, and refused to come out. The guards finally left, Höllenreiner remembered. "Even as a child, you understood that they got the message, that this time the people would fight back," he said. He added that the guards knew that a few of them might lose their lives in the attempt to squash the resistance, and that they would not be able to gas all the inmates without fierce opposition. Many prisoners who were fit for work were then transferred to other concentration camps. Cousins Hugo and Mano Höllenreiner, along with their parents and siblings, thereby escaped being murdered in Auschwitz. However, the approximately 4,300 remaining prisoners — children, mothers, the elderly and the sick — were herded onto trucks in the night from August 2 to 3, 1944. They fought back with all their might, a Polish prisoner observed: "Women were the toughest fighters — they were younger and stronger — and defended their children." But they were all murdered in the gas chambers. That very night, according to the observer, black smoke from the crematorium drifted over the camp. August 2 is now observed as European Roma Holocaust Remembrance Day. Anxiety over Berlin memorial to murdered Sinti, Roma To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Sinti, Roma fight for survival together The resistance of the Sinti and Roma in Auschwitz has not been researched comprehensively, historian Karola Fings told DW, adding that for a long time no one was interested in it. Fings, from the Antiziganism Research Center at Heidelberg University, is the editor of "The Encyclopedia of the Nazi Genocide of the Sinti and Roma in Europe," compiled to make documents available online and encourage new research. The atmospherically dense reports, said Fings, show the struggle for survival and the joint search for strategies. In view of the horror in Birkenau, it is incredible how people came together in solidarity in order to survive, she said. Germany remembers Nazi genocide of Sinti, Roma with culture To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Sinti, Roma women protest deportations Sinti and Roma families in Auschwitz were not divided into men's and women's blocks like other prisoners. This also has to do with their earlier resistance to persecution, according to Fings. "When Sinti and Roma families were separated, there was fierce resistance," she said. As early as 1938, when several hundred Sinti and Roma men were deported to concentration camps, it was mainly the women who protested. "The wives, mothers, sisters and daughters traveled to Berlin and campaigned for the release of their male relatives. They often accepted that protesting in public could mean they themselves would be deported to concentration camps because they were so unruly," explained Fings. At the time, Sinti and Roma activists called in lawyers and sent letters of protest to all state authorities, from the criminal investigation department to the office of dictator Adolf Hitler. After the Nazi era, resistance continues After World War II, the racist persecution and genocide of the Sinti and Roma at the hands of the Nazis were widely denied in West German society. The justice system was rife with supporters of the Nazi regime, and Nazi perpetrators made a career in academia or the police and harassed members of the minority during compensation proceedings. "It was a terrible struggle for survivors," said Fings. Heinz Strauss survived Auschwitz and lost many relatives in the Holocaust. His son, Daniel, is involved in the civil rights movement today, as chairman of the State Association of German Sinti and Roma in the state of Baden-Württemberg. "We have achieved recognition as a national minority, we have achieved recognition of the genocide," said Strauss. What is the German government doing for Sinti and Roma? In its coalition agreement, the new federal government has committed itself to the fight against antisemitism and the protection of Jewish life. However, Sinti and Roma are not mentioned in the document, nor is the fight against antiziganism. Lawyer Mehmet Daimagüler told DW that this omission concerns him. Daimagüler was the previous government's commissioner for antiziganism and has campaiged for the rights of Sinti and Roma in Germany. Many measures — developed by the Independent Commission on Antiziganism — were adopted during his term of office, but they now need to be implemented. The commissioner was an important bridge between the government and members of the minority, Roma activist Renata Conkova told DW, adding that abolishing the office would be a mistake. Conkova offers counseling for immigrant Roma families in the eastern German state of Thuringia, especially those from Ukraine. Despite much progress and political commitment, people from the minority are still being discriminated against in kindergartens and schools, in government offices, when looking for housing and in the workplace, said Conkova. "We want to solve the problems," she said, adding that this can only be done together with politicians and authorities. This article was originally written in German. While you're here: Every Tuesday, DW editors round up what is happening in German politics and society. You can sign up here for the weekly email newsletter Berlin Briefing.
Irish Times
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favourite film-maker: ‘After the first page of Mein Kampf she became an enthusiastic Nazi'
When she was 100, a year before her death , Leni Riefenstahl , who was perhaps second only to Joseph Goebbels as Nazi Germany 's leading propagandist, faced legal action over her continual misrepresentation of the fate of the Roma and Sinti people who had appeared in her film Lowlands, which she began to make in 1940. Riefenstahl had used Romas as extras, many of them 'borrowed' and subsequently returned to the regime's concentration camps. 'I regret that Sinti and Roma had to suffer during the period of National Socialism,' she said. But she also remarked about the claims against her, 'I'm not saying Gypsies need to lie, but, really, who's more likely to commit perjury, me or the Gypsies?' Riefenstahl, an authoritative new documentary by the Swiss film-maker Andres Veiel , exposes decades of contradictory statements and obfuscation from the director who played a huge part in shaping Adolf Hitler 's public image. 'For example, there was an interview by the Daily Express from 1934,' Veiel says. Official documents referred to the interview, 'but the interview itself was missing. We found it in the archive of the Daily Express. In 1934 she said she bought Mein Kampf and read it. And after the first page she became an enthusiastic National Socialist. READ MORE 'It was obvious why this was missing, because she was just telling the interviewer not only how close she was to Hitler but how she was deeply involved in Nazi ideology. The interesting point for us was not just to show 'This is a lie' and 'That is a lie' but to look at how she was constantly shifting and editing her story.' Working alongside a German journalist and TV host, Sandra Maischberger, Veiel gained unprecedented access to the Riefenstahl archives, a vast collection of material related to the film-maker's life and work, including photographs, correspondence and recordings of telephone calls. For decades she kept the material at her home in Bavaria, carefully curating it to amplify her artistry while downplaying her role in the Third Reich. Veiel says he watched hundreds of interviews in which Riefenstahl used exactly the same phrases, as if she were reading from a script: 'I was never interested in politics. I was just an artist,' she would say; 'I had nothing to do with the regime.' [ Riefenstahl review: Unrepentant propagandist will make you want to yell at the screen ] Many parts of the archive remain difficult to access because of ongoing legal and ethical debates, but Veiel was able to sift through some 700 boxes of material while researching his damning documentary. The rolls of film alone fill 140 chests. His sleuthing yields several chilling revelations, including Riefenstahl's part in a massacre in Konskie in 1939. The film-maker was in the Polish town on her way to record the Nazis' defeat of the country, and wanted to shoot a street scene. According to a letter written by a Nazi officer, she demanded that 'the Jews' be 'removed'. When relayed by a lance corporal, her directive prompted some Jewish locals to run. German soldiers responded by opening fire. 'This is a good example of her storytelling,' Veiel says. 'Before 1952 she claimed, 'I was a witness of a massacre'. She didn't always say it was a Jewish massacre but that Polish people were killed. Then, in 1952, she changed the narrative and said, 'No, I was far away. I heard about the episode. But I never saw corpses. I never saw any atrocities.' 'We had TV footage from the middle of the 1950s, and you realise she is learning this new story by heart. It's still a lie, but she's working on it, like a bad actress. Then, five years later, the lie became the truth for her. She was straightforward about attacking people with another opinion or view.' Riefenstahl was initially a dancer and actor; she rose to prominence as Hitler's favourite director, most notably for Triumph of the Will, a glorification of the Nuremberg Rally of 1934. In 1993 Riefenstahl claimed she was merely a film-maker for hire and was disgusted that Triumph of the Will was used to promote Nazism. But Veiel's documentary quotes from a letter she wrote to Hitler: 'The film's impact as German propaganda is greater than I could have imagined, and your image, my Führer, is always applauded.' Hitler then chose Riefenstahl to make a documentary about the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Despite her later claims of political naivety, Riefenstahl used all her artistic talents to fill the film, Olympia, with images of athletic prowess designed to both legitimise and romanticise the Nazi regime. A prologue depicting the return of the Greek gods echoes Hitler's idea of Sparta as the 'clearest racial state' and his projection of a future 'Völkisch state'. (Behind the scenes of the film, Willy Zielke, its cinematographer, was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, where he was experimented on and forcibly sterilised, after a dispute with Riefenstahl.) 'Olympia projected this image of being strong, healthy, and victorious,' Veiel says. 'The aesthetics of her films are an interesting point for me. It's never just the question of self-optimising. There's always a contempt for weakness. The contempt for people who are 'not healthy', who don't fit into that pattern. They jeopardise the Reich because, according to her ideology, they are lunatics and criminals. They are dirty. They spoil the national blood.' Leni Riefenstahl with Adolph Hitler at a party in Nuremberg in the 1930s. Photograph: Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty In a notorious appearance on a late-night German chatshow in 1976, Riefenstahl was confronted by Elfriede Kretschmer, an anti-Nazi activist during the war. Kretschmer calmly asked the rattled film-maker how someone so close to the inner workings of the Third Reich could know so little about life under the Nazis. Riefenstahl received sacks of fan mail in the days after the broadcast, praising her composure and denouncing Kretschmer. The letters were hard for Veiel to read. 'It was horrifying,' he says. 'It was not just the issue of Leni Riefenstahl. It was a mirror image of West Germany. A lot of German authorities in postwar Germany worked for the Reich. [Kurt Georg] Kiesinger worked for Goebbels in a high-ranking position, but he became chancellor of West Germany in the 1960s. A lot of the messages sent about Leni Riefenstahl said, 'Stop stirring up the guilt of the past and leave this great artist alone.' Or, 'We are the silent majority, and we stick to the ideology.' After the war Riefenstahl was arrested and supposedly de-Nazified, but she was never convicted of any crimes. Several high-profile film-makers have attempted to bring Riefenstahl's life to the screen, including Steven Soderbergh and Jodie Foster . Quentin Tarantino has called her the best director who ever lived. For them to respect Riefenstahl's technical achievements, and want to chart them in a biopic, is very different from respecting her as a person, of course, but Veiel still finds any kind of admiration for the film-maker extremely disturbing. [ Fionola Meredith: The terrible wonder of Leni Riefenstahl's life took hold of my imagination Opens in new window ] 'I don't know if it's just naive,' he says. 'I always say you can't separate the ideology from the aesthetics. You can't just celebrate the aesthetics not seeing the contempt behind it. It's not just an attitude. People were incarcerated. People were sterilised. And many people were killed because of this ideology. How can you omit this fact?' Riefenstahl is in cinemas from Friday, May 9th
New York Times
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
At the Bonnefanten Museum, Artists Try to Imagine a Better World
A two-legged unicorn pulls a wooden chariot draped in purple velvet. Nearby, a bejeweled gold dog dressed in a purple and pink jacket plays next to a laundry line, where a film is projected onto a dangling sheet, drying in the wind. This is the utopian vision created by the Sinti artist Morena Bamberger in an art installation she calls 'Sonnekaskro Djiephen,' or 'a life of gold.' It imagines a world in which her people, who used to be nomadic, could still travel anywhere on wooden wheels. Bamberger grew up in a tightknit Sinti community living in a small cluster of trailers in the town of Herkenbosch, in the southeastern Netherlands. 'You leave the door open, the coffeepot is always warm,' she said. 'It's like a family of 35 people.' Today, European laws restrict the Sinti and Roma ethnic groups from continuing their traditional nomadic lifestyle, but Bamberger can still dream of a world where her community can roam free. Her installation is one of more than 60 artworks featured in the exhibition, 'Dream On,' on display at the Bonnefanten museum in Maastricht through March 30. The exhibition focuses on a recent trend in contemporary art, said a co-curator, Roxy Jongewaard, in which artists try to imagine a better world. 'Over the past five years, we've acquired a lot of artists that are activists, but in a very hopeful way,' she said. 'We've come out of a time when institutional criticism and critique was a very big deal, and now we see that there's more artists who change the conversation to say, 'What if?,' 'Is this possible?' and 'Can we dream up a better future?'' Often, Jongewaard added, these artists use the languages of fairy tales, myths, folklore and songs to explore their utopian dreams, or other forms of expression that are 'very deeply rooted in our collective identity, in the biggest sense of the word,' she said. 'They use them, and they rephrase them, and it becomes a whole new thing, through which we can see the world of the future.' Celien Govaerts, the other co-curator, said the exhibition's title was a playful reinterpretation of a common expression. 'We often use this phrase, 'Dream on,' kind of like, 'You do you,'' she said. 'It's a way to put people down a little bit, to say they're crazy. We wanted to reclaim this saying, for a positive reason.' The artworks all come from the museum's permanent collection, and they are by emerging and famous contemporary artists, such as Grayson Perry, Laure Prouvost and Otobong Nkanga. The oldest artist in the show, Betye Saar, from Los Angeles, is 98, and the youngest artist is Sofiia Dubyna, 24, who moved to the Netherlands to study art from her hometown, Donetsk, Ukraine, before it was seized by Russia in 2022. Mythical creatures and monsters play an important role in the exhibition's artworks that also address serious topics like decolonization, climate change and feminism. Humor and fantasy are part of the imagery, but the subject is often social change. A 2019 video work by the Kuwaiti Puerto Rican filmmaker Alia Farid, titled 'At the Time of the Ebb,' for example, captures a longstanding tradition: an annual ritual on Qeshm, a small island off southern Iran, celebrating the arrival of the fishing season. Participants dress up as camels, horses and birds and dance by the sea to honor the gifts of nature and then feast. 'The meaning has changed over time,' Jongewaard explained, 'but you can see how they're trying to adapt this celebration so that it will last another 1,000 years.' The exhibition presents several intricately detailed textile works in lush colors by the Roma artist Malgorzata Mirga-Tas that were also featured in her solo Bonnefanten show, 'This is not the end of the world.' Among them is a portrait of the leading Roma activist Lalla Weiss, who has spent years raising public awareness about the genocide of Roma and Sinti people during World War II, a part of the Holocaust that has often been overlooked. Weiss is presented seated in a proud posture on a mountainside, with the material folds of her glittering gold and pink skirt poking out from the canvas. By invoking such positive referents of activism, and combining them with bright colors and lighthearted imagery, Jongewaard said, contemporary artists in recent years — instead of 'doom-mongering' — have added an element of joy to the way they explore political ideas. 'In a society that is so polarized — people are scared, people feel pressure and negativity all around them — artists are shifting towards a more positive and empathic tone of voice, trying to reach out,' she said. 'In making a dreamlike narrative, you might think it was a form of escapism, but it's not. 'How they process their feelings about their identity is straying further from reality,' she added, 'so they're becoming more fanciful.' The Sinti artist, Bamberger, said she had long felt that people in the modern era had become too removed from their more adventurous urges, and that she wanted to use art to provoke a return to the wilder side of our imaginations. 'We were once wolves living in a pack in the forest, howling free; we were free beings, autonomous,' she said, employing a fairy-tale metaphor. 'But unfortunately, we became these little Chihuahuas, being fed and petted at home, and so we became very lazy.' She wants her art to awaken in viewers a sense of vitality and a connection to their deeper purpose of life. 'I ask people to look past this illusion, and to go into themselves, to think about their gifts, and to ask, what does it mean to truly live?' she said. 'How do you know that you're alive right now? How do you know what is real?'
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Berlin's Brandenburg Gate lit up to commemorate Holocaust victims
The landmark Brandenburg Gate in Berlin was lit up after sunset on Monday to commemorate the victims of Auschwitz, 80 years after the liberation of the Nazi death camp. The words #weremember were projected onto the top of the landmark, situated in the centre of Berlin near the embassies of the United States, France, Britain and Russia, who defeated Nazi Germany in World War II. The international campaign launched by the World Jewish Congress and UNESCO organizes events each year to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27. In Berlin, events and church services were planned throughout the day. Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner recalled in a statement that the systematic extermination of European Jews, Sinti and Roma by the Nazis was planned and organized from Berlin. "It is our common duty and our historical heritage to remember the victims of Nazi terror and the Shoah and to give a voice to the surviving witnesses," Wegner said, "But it is also our responsibility to stand up against any form of anti-Semitism," he said. "Because the enemies of democracy must never be louder than those who stand up for peace, freedom and democracy." On January 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers liberated the German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz located in German-occupied Poland. Some 1.1 million were killed at Auschwitz, including about 1 million Jews.
