As living memory fades, a survivor of Nazi Germany warns against underestimating the rise of the far-right.

Record ID: 1363423

  • Title: As living memory fades, a survivor of Nazi Germany warns against underestimating the rise of the far-right.
  • Date: 7th November 2018
  • Summary: (SOUNDBITE) (German) JEWISH-GERMAN WORLD WAR TWO SURVIVOR AND WITNESS OF THE KRISTALLNACHT, MARGIT SIEBNER, SAYING: "I am the last to point fingers. Who knows what I would have done. I can remember that I wanted to join the BDM (The League of German Girls) because all the others used to talk about it. Well after a while I didn't want to join any more, after I started to hear songs being sung on the streets singing: 'when Jewish blood squirts of the knives'. Well, then I didn't want to join any more. But before that I was sad about always being the different one. Everyone in my class was a member of the BDM, all of them." LETTER TO SIEBNER FROM HER FATHER (SOUNDBITE) (German) JEWISH-GERMAN WORLD WAR TWO SURVIVOR AND WITNESS OF THE KRISTALLNACHT, MARGIT SIEBNER, SAYING: "Well I stopped being invited to birthday parties. The fathers were all in the party but even there, there was a good man and I am glad to tell you about that. There was a coal-seller on the Spittelmarkt and I have to tell you the Berlin way, and he said: 'I don't have to go along with all this shit. Coal will always be in demand.' And what would have happened if he had been denounced! But he wasn't. And this coal-vendor had a small daughter and I was allowed to play with her. And I was allowed to go to her birthday and I will never forget how he stroked my cheek with his sooty fingers and I had to eat so much cake I was nearly ill. And that sort of thing happened too, you see." SIEBNER PUTTING HER PHOTOS AWAY (SOUNDBITE) (German) JEWISH-GERMAN WORLD WAR TWO SURVIVOR AND WITNESS OF THE KRISTALLNACHT, MARGIT SIEBNER, SAYING: "Of course at the end of World War Two we said: 'Never Again', but look at what is happening again in the world and not just in Germany but in France, Holland, everywhere and I was recently asked by someone whether I have an appeal to the students and the young people and I say: 'Resist the beginnings', because you know, back then people didn't take those beginning signs seriously. I experienced in myself." SIEBNER SITTING IN LIVING ROOM
  • Embargoed: 21st November 2018 20:44
  • Keywords: Kristallnacht Jewish pogroms Nazi Germany Nazis anti-semitism Margit Siebner survivor of Nazi Germany
  • Location: BERLIN, GERMANY
  • City: BERLIN, GERMANY
  • Country: Germany
  • Topics: Conflicts/War/Peace
  • Reuters ID: LVA00E95I916V
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Margit Siebner was ten years old when a state-sponsored spree of looting and destruction of Jewish property across Germany and Austria targeted the shop of her mother and other Jewish neighbours.
    November 9, 2018 marks 80 years since Kristallnacht, a turning point in Nazi policy as Adolf Hitler unleashed the general population against the Jews.
    Siebner's German mother owned a tobacco shop on the Spittelmarkt, bought for her by her Jewish husband after his bookshop was confiscated and Aryanised in 1936. On the night of Kristallnacht, Siebner's father was already in Buchenwald concentration camp accused of illegally attempting to sell a book. Her mother's shop was daubed in the white paint to tell the mob which were Jewish properties.
    Scores of Jews were killed in the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), and thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues were ransacked as law-enforcement organs looked on, signalling the start of the Holocaust.
    Siebner recalled her shock upon discovering that even the 'protectors' - as the police were sometimes called - would do nothing.
    Berlin burned well into the next day as a result of the Nazi pogroms.
    Siebner, as a child of Jewish-German parents, belonged to a group Hitler classified as 'half-breeds' and was discriminated against at school. Race classes were introduced and Siebner remembers a small triumph as her ear lobes were shown to not adhere to the race predictions of Nazi race theorist Alfred Rosenberg. Classes included measuring Aryan and Jewish students' heads alleged to pinpoint differences in the 'races'.
    While recalling that few people had come forward to help against the burning and looting, Siebner said there were exceptions and moments of kindness, such as the time when a local coal vendor continued to allow his daughter to play with her and sold coal to the family.
    Margit Siebner survived the war working in a munitions factory under a false name. Her father was bailed out of Buchenwald by her mother who was then forced to divorce her husband. Fritz Cohn managed to emigrate to Shanghai in 1938 where he ran a mobile bookshop until his death from tuberculosis in 1946.
    Siebner, who worked as a physiotherapist after achieving a psychology degree, told Reuters, if she had a plea it would be for young people to take early warning signs seriously and move to nip any form of extremism in the bud.
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
  • Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2018. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
  • Usage Terms/Restrictions: None
Register