BERLIN -- A film about the last trainload of Jews from Berlin to Auschwitz has its premiere Thursday amid controversy over the German rail operator's refusal to allow exhibitions in stations about its role in transporting the Nazis' victims to their deaths.
The rail operator, Deutsche Bahn, has financed Der letze Zug (The Last Train), which portrays the journey in April 1943 of 688 Jews from the German capital to the infamous death camp in Poland where 1.1 million people were put to the deaths.
"The film can move people in a different way than if they visited a memorial or our exhibition in the Deutsche Bahn museum in Nuremberg," Deutsche Bahn chief executive Hartmut Mehdorn said.
Deutsche Bahn is prepared to allow the exhibition to travel around the country to be displayed in museums near stations, but stations themselves "are not the place for a subject as important as the Holocaust," Mehdorn insisted.
"This is in no way to deny that the rail operator at that time, the Deutsche Reichsbahn, took part in these crimes."
The Nazi state paid the Reichsbahn 25 Reichsmarks, equivalent to €25 ($32), for each child that it transported to the camps, normally crammed together in cattle trucks.
Many Jews were gassed as soon as they arrived at Auschwitz.
The film will be shown to coincide with the inauguration of the new central synagogue in the southern city of Munich.
Thursday also marks 68 years since the start of Kristallnacht, a two-day orgy of violence in which more than 7,500 Jewish-owned shops and 400 synagogues were burned and 20,000 Jews rounded up and sent to camps.
German transport minister Wolfgang Tiefensee this year unsuccessfully urged Deutsche Bahn to allow stations to be used for an exhibition organized by an association representing the sons and daughters of Jews deported from France.
"The deportation of Jewish children should be commemorated where it happened, in stations," Tiefensee said.
One of the founders of the French association, Beate Klarsfeld, said that Deutsche Bahn had got its priorities wrong.
"It is a good thing that it has financed this film, but it is a different approach. Mr. Mehdorn is putting his money into cinema rather than into his stations."
Source:
METimes.com