Berlin – A planned renaming of the street in Oranienburg causes controversy. This is not about a local matter of the district town at the end of a Berlin S-Bahn line. It’s about the basic handling of historical events, it’s about the culture of remembrance. Because the street is to be named after a woman, the experts have now proven a permanent closeness to right-wing radical ideas and personal contacts in this scene.
The city wants to honor Gisela Gneist as a sacrifice. Because after 1945 the ardent anti-communist sat in that special camp of the Soviet occupiers, which they operated in the previous Nazi concentration camp.
Subcamp of the concentration camp
The street is in the new development area Aderluch. Axel Drecoll, director of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation, says that it would be located on the grounds of a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the “Zeppelin” commando, in which young Eastern Europeans had to do forced labor to build airships from 1942 onwards. There is also a plan to name a street after a concentration camp victim. Survivors of the concentration camp see this equation of the victims as inappropriate. That is why there is a protest from the International Sachsenhausen Committee.
The report comes to the conclusion: Gneist was arrested by the Soviet secret service and imprisoned under inhumane conditions in the special camp from 1946 to 1950. From 1995 until her death in 2007 she was chairwoman of the Sachsenhausen camp association 1945–1950.
Expert Hermann Wentker said that Gneist was a BDM leader herself, that is, in the Nazi organization Bund Deutscher Mädel. After the war she belonged to the anti-Soviet group “German National Democratic Party”, in which a former SS officer candidate was vice chief. The party published the magazine Germanische Freiheit to fight against Bolshevism. The group wanted to arm itself. She was arrested.
The decisive factor for the rejection of the street renaming is the behavior of the woman after 1989. At that time there were debates about the orientation of the East German places of remembrance, which before that had above all paid tribute to the communist resistance. Jewish victims were not the focus – and the victims of the Soviets were taboo, said expert Frank Bajohr. Gisela Gneist fought for the recognition of this group of victims.
“Opposition to the culture of remembrance in the FRG”
“However, Gisela Gneist played a more than problematic role,” he says. She opposed historians and memorial site managers who tried to achieve balance and differentiation in a polemical and confrontational manner, sometimes with anti-Semitic undertones and personal defamations. “At the same time, she showed no reservations about right-wing extremist positions and people.” He is considered a pioneer of the new right, whose institute is classified as a suspected right-wing extremist case by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Gneist also invited right-wing extremists to Sachsenhausen.
The two experts come to the conclusion that Gneist “persisted in an opposition to the remembrance culture of the Federal Republic.”
dpa / Patrick Pleul
Oranienburg: Entrance to the prisoner camp with “Tower A” on the grounds of the Sachsenhausen Memorial
Foundation director Axel Drecoll says: “The Soviet special camps were places of inhumanity, lawlessness and violence. Our democratic culture of remembrance naturally includes remembering the suffering of those detained in special camps, including Gisela Gneist. ”But a street should not be named after her. “She has evidently completely refused a differentiated analysis of the Nazi burden and Nazi perpetrators among the special camp inmates.”
Drecoll said the memorial had been asked multiple times by the city and raised the concerns. He called on the city council to a critical discussion process. “We are open to conducting this dialogue in order to arrive at an alternative result.”
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