Why is the Topf & Sons – Builders of the Auschwitz Ovens – Place of Remembrance important to you?
This Place of Remembrance is important to me
for various reasons, both personal and professional.
I’m a historian specializing in the history of the Holocaust,
and I consider it very important to understand
how the participation in the Holocaust
became so deeply entrenched in the German society,
in the everyday life of German society.
There were people here in Erfurt
who designed technology for the mass murder committed in Auschwitz.
That shows that not just Berlin, Munich, etc.,
the others, Germany’s major power centres,
played a role in this crime.
This place, the Place of Remembrance,
also holds personal significance for me.
Apart from my professional practice as a historian,
I am the son of Holocaust survivors
and I have many relatives, my grandparents
and many aunts and uncles,
who perished in the Holocaust.
Several of them were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Even though this topic is not the subject of my own research,
I am extremely interested in it,
and try to understand this entire historical complex.