Kurt Nelhiebel | In times like these

Bremen (Weltexpresso) – In times like these, when the foundations of our democratic homeland are being undermined by its enemies, everyone should realise what they remember from their school days after the Second World War or from books about the time shortly before the National Socialists seized power; it shouldn’t be much.

Wasn’t it the case that back then – just like today – many believed that things wouldn’t be quite as bad as some feared once the people with the swastika armband were at the helm? Many voters of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), especially many young people who only know about Nazi terror from hearsay, suspect something similar today. It was a terrible awakening.

I am 97 years old and experienced National Socialism at first hand. After the First World War, there were many people, especially among the labour force, who warned in good time of the dangers that the Nazis‘ rule posed for Germany. They remained steadfast even when they had to reckon with years of imprisonment in one of the many concentration camps that were springing up like mushrooms in all parts of the German Reich.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who led his country to victory over Hitler’s Germany, reminded the world of this in 1947:

„In Germany lived an opposition which is one of the noblest that has ever been produced in the history of nations. These men and women fought without help from within or without, driven solely by the restlessness of their conscience. Their deeds are the indestructible foundation of a new reconstruction.“

Unfortunately, this noble approach was crushed by everyday politics in divided Germany. In the East, communist resistance was brought to the fore, while in the West it was largely hushed up. It was mainly the victims who were remembered. The active fighters inevitably fell behind.

In contrast to France, where communist resistance fighters are also given a place of honour in the Pantheon in the middle of Paris, those responsible in Germany have found no better place for the bust of Sophie Scholl, the shining symbol of German resistance against the Nazi regime, than Valhalla in the loneliness of the Bavarian pampas. This shameful situation should be brought to an end and a place created in the centre of the German capital that does justice not only to Sophie Scholl and her comrades-in-arms, but to the entire German resistance against the Nazi regime.

There are about fifty federal government commissioners for everything imaginable. When will a commissioner for the memory of the German resistance against the Nazi regime finally be appointed?