80 Years of Liberation | "Repressed and Unremembered"

This year, the Berlin district of Marzahn-Hellersdorf once again raised the blue-green flag on April 8, on International Roma Day. The blue in the flag represents the sky, the green the earth, and the spoked wheel in the center is considered a symbol of the traveling people. The flag is controversial within the Roma community, which includes the Sinti. The website of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma does not contain the spoked wheel, nor the colors blue and green. But regardless, the press release speaks of an important symbol.

"On this day, we draw attention to the fact that people from this ethnic group continue to be subjected to great prejudice and marginalization," said CDU district mayor Nadja Zivkovic. Her district, she says, has a "special responsibility to draw attention to this issue" in this regard. These are words that contrast with her party's policies: Friedrich Merz never tires of calling for a restrictive asylum policy. And the Roma, for example, those who immigrated from Serbia, are among the first to be deported today. Such a contradiction between words and actions has a long tradition in Berlin-Marzahn.

Application rejected

Forty years ago, a group of East German citizens wanted to observe a minute's silence to commemorate the liberation of the Marzahn concentration camp. The camp had been located near the cemetery. From 1936 to 1945, around 1,200 Sinti had been forced to live there under miserable conditions. Most of them died in Auschwitz. A piece of Berlin history, as the late author Reimar Gilsenbach wrote, "repressed and unremembered." The "Marzahn Rest Area" was the first camp for those persecuted for racial reasons, located near the former sewage farms, which mocked the Sinti's purity laws and further humiliated the victims. Hitler had the camp built in May 1936, in time for the Olympic Games. Gilsenbach wrote: "The world's sports youth should see the Reich capital free of Gypsies." Even before the synagogues burned, there was Marzahn, even before Buchenwald and Ravensbrück, even before the ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw, even before Treblinka and Auschwitz…

In 1965, Gilsenbach was commissioned by the "Wochenpost" newspaper to investigate a letter to the editor from a Sinti from Leipzig. Many years later, Annett Gröschner wrote about this in the "Taz": "His report was never published, but Gilsenbach had found his subject: the Sinti should finally be recognized as victims of the Nazi regime." About 300 of them still lived in the GDR. In one of his books – "Django, Sing Dein Zorn," published three years after reunification – Gilsenbach recalled the pastor from Neuenhagen near Berlin, Peter Leu, who had tried unsuccessfully in 1985 to register a memorial event near the old site of the Marzahn forced labor camp. "Gypsy Camp Marzahn Minutes of Remembrance" was the title of the letter to the authorities. The application also included the prayer that Pastor Leu wanted to recite there before a handful of Christians, in the presence of a dozen Sinti, the children and grandchildren of the victims. "Lord, we have gone together to this place of remembrance," read the transcript, which had been reviewed by the Permits Department. "We encounter past guilt. What remembrance is adequate to the depths of horror! Let this memory help us grow in responsibility for one another, for our world and its liberation to peace. Amen." The motion was rejected.

If Pastor Leu had only been concerned with silent remembrance of the murdered Sinti, he could have simply held a minute's silence on the wasteland not far from the Bruno-Leuschner-Straße S-Bahn station and spent a moment in prayer with his fellow Sinti there: where there is no accuser, there is no judge. Presumably, nothing would have been done by the state. In conversation with the author of this article, Pastor Leu, now retired, recalls that at the time, he was concerned with much more than registering for public prayer. The state and society should address this issue: the murder of half a million Sinti by the Nazis.

A discourse intervention

Today, one would call it a radical discourse intervention—except that there were no "discourses" in the GDR. That was the problem. The political structures of that state were never intended for people to come together one day to discuss critical issues. The pastor's motion touched on the anti-fascist founding myth of the GDR—the very foundation of its political business, so to speak.

Gilsenbach also recounts this in his book. On May 8, 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the liberation from Hitler's fascism, speeches were held everywhere in remembrance of the victims who had died under the guillotine or perished in the camps. High-ranking representatives spoke, "celebrated veterans of the resistance." However, not a single speaker mentioned the Sinti among the victims, not in Buchenwald or Sachsenhausen, nor at the Ravensbrück Memorial. "And not one of all the speakers went to Marzahn!"

On May 8, 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the liberation from Hitler's fascism, speeches were held everywhere. However, not a single speaker mentioned the Sinti among the victims.

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The fact that the minute's silence was banned at the time, allegedly because the victims of fascism had already been commemorated throughout the country, is indicative of the nature of the state's anti-fascist doctrine. This newspaper needs no emphasis on the fact that the Politburo and party apparatus never derived their legitimacy from free elections, but rather from the supposedly legitimate course of history: Because communists had paid such a high price in blood in the fight against fascism, they deserved the leading role in the first workers' and peasants' state on German soil. But if the Roma suffered far more victims than the communists during the Nazi era, which was demonstrably the case, then the old state narrative was also called into question.

Tradition and heritage

Roughly speaking, historians in the GDR therefore distinguished between tradition and heritage. In the collective consciousness, the Sinti were seen as work-shy "Gypsies," a "traveling people" who made music, stole, and begged. SED officials, who were striving everywhere for order, discipline, and the fulfillment of their plans, did not include the murder of half a million Roma in the justification of their anti-fascist, revolutionary tradition. The deaths of the Roma and Sinti in the gas chambers were a German heritage that the GDR (as well as West German memory policy, incidentally) was unwilling to accept—in contrast, for example, to the Shoah.

The murder of six million European Jews certainly occupied a significant space in the memory landscape of GDR citizens; just to name a few, Frank Beyer's "Jakob the Liar," based on the novel by Jurek Becker, the only GDR film production ever nominated for an Oscar. The murdered Sinti and Roma, however, barely figured in the collective memory. "Ede and Unku," the 1931 children's book by Alex Wedding, was indeed required reading in schools. But when Reimar Gilsenbach wrote about the fate of Unku and her family, his articles were not printed in the GDR. Kaula, Unku's cousin, was the only member of the family to survive the genocide. Gilsenbach helped her obtain a victim's pension as a victim of the Nazi regime, as did Margarete Kraus, a Sinti woman who, when she first applied, was unable to name three witnesses to her deportation. How could she? Her family members had all been murdered. But on her forearm she still wore the prisoner number tattooed in Auschwitz.

It is astonishing that the Protestant Church, in the person of Pastor Leu and soon also the Marzahn pastor Bruno Schottstädt, took up the memory of this injustice. For, like anti-Semitism, racist anti-Gypsyism also has a religious origin. After all, there was a time when Luther demanded that princes treat Jews "like Gypsies." This obviously meant placing them in a workhouse, where compulsory labor was imposed and the inmates, both male and female, were forced to perform forced labor. In the social hierarchy, the "Gypsies" were always far below the Jews, who, from the church's perspective, were at least to be evangelized.

Nobody has to be there

The continuation of the story is also astonishing: Twelve months after the state ban on a minute's silence, a church memorial service was permitted in Marzahn, on June 29, 1986, at the municipal cemetery, expressly for "the victims of the fascist forced labor camp for Sinti." And in September of the same year, a memorial stone by the artist Jürgen Raue was unveiled. However, the inauguration—after all, around the Day of the Victims of Fascism, September 12, thus not an arbitrary date—took place without any press announcement. "The SED was under pressure at the time; something had to be done about this issue," says Pastor Peter Leu, "but no one had to be there."

The fact that some Sinti were present at the event was due to chance. A few days earlier, they had visited the cemetery to tend the graves of their relatives when the cemetery gardener approached them and told them about the upcoming dedication of the memorial stone. With only two days left, mobilization within the Sinti community was hardly possible. Pastor Leu still remembers the two FDJ members who stood guard of honor at the stone. Labor veterans and representatives from the Marzahn district office were present. Leu noted on a note at the time that the organizers only noticed the Sinti's presence at the end. As they left the cemetery, they were told, "Oh, we didn't know you were here."