Two weeks ago, The Daily Mail, Express, Al Arabiya, Sputnik, RT, and the Times of Israel were all outraged over the German government’s housing of refugees in former concentration camp Buchenwald. The headlines screamed “Housed in a notorious concentration camp: Refugees who fled to Europe for a better live are living in former Nazi barracks at Buchenwald where thousands of slave-labourers died after being subjected to medical experiments” and other similar clickbait. It got so bad that the Russian Embassy in London tweeted “Refugees from Middle East housed in Buchenwald Nazi camp – a reminder of grim past?” along with a picture of Holocaust prisoners.
Interestingly, to groups like this they’re only “refugees” when it makes Germany look bad. Otherwise they’re migrants.
Days after this storm of outrage began, Buzzfeed came to the rescue, shaming these outlets for their stretching of the truth, since the places these specific refugees were housed were 12 miles away from Buchenwald and were merely the location of barracks where SS soldiers had slept, “the original barracks and guards’ quarters were torn down long ago”. They go on to compliment Germany’s generous handling of the refugee crisis and excuse the little ethical lapse of housing people in Nazi barracks. Unfortunately, for all their attempted good, in justifying the move by claiming it’s not actually a concentration camp, even Buzzfeed missed the point.
The point is that we have no right to be offended by this move. On the contrary, we should be impressed. Germany is taking in 800,000 refugees this year, despite lacking the infrastructure to properly deal with such a number, because this is a humanitarian emergency. And so, as major outlets report that other refugees are being housed at Dachau concentration camp, not some site miles away like in the Buchenwald example but the actual site where Jews were worked to death by the Nazis, it’s refreshing to see The Guardian focusing on what matters: how do the refugees feel about it? The answers may not be warm, but they are important:
“Where else should I live with my three children? On the street? This is better.”
“I just wanted a roof over my head.”
Thousands of refugees are already living in tents in the parks of German cities from Hamburg to Berlin as communities and cities are searching for any available room and coming up short. According to the Guardian article, refugees seeking to rent on their own are being turned away, either due to price or xenophobia. For refugees in Germany, housing in a former concentration camp means a bed and four walls and a roof and running water, a situation infinitely better than a park bench under the sky.
This is a vulnerable minority being housed in a place where vulnerable minorities were once put to death en masse. But there is no better choice. The best Germany can do is to reclaim this spot from atrocity and turn it into a humanitarian resource. If Germany opened and renovated the rest of the camp at Dachau, there would be beds for thousands. If they opened all the former camps throughout Germany, from Bergen-Belsen to Sachsenhausen, there would be beds for hundreds of thousands. What could possibly be a more meaningful way to honor the memory of the dead than to save lives?
Outrage at Germany by British, Russian, American, or Israeli outlets over the housing of immigrants in former Nazi camps is contrived at best, hypocrisy at worst. We created this crisis. From the Russian invasion of Afghanistan to the US-led NATO invasion of Afghanistan, millions of Afghans became refugees, though many have recently returned home. The Russian incursion has turned Crimea and Eastern Ukraine into conflict zones and created 900,000 refugees. NATO’s US-led war in Iraq has created another 2 million refugees. The situation in Israel, for which we are all, though especially Britain, USA and Israel itself, responsible, has turned 5 million Palestinians into refugees. If we had not collectively created these millions of refugees, there would be no global refugee crisis. There would still be refugees, but the situation would be manageable. But there is a global refugee crisis, and not only have we created it: we have shunned our responsibilities, with Russia and Israel taking zero refugees while the USA plans to take only 70,000 in 2015 with David Cameron finally increasing the UK’s intake of Syrian refugees to a meager 20,000 over the course of 5 years. In addition to this shirked responsibility, we have collectively underfunded the UN Refugee agency by $3.47 billion.
We made this mess, while Germany is actually making an effort to help. It is certainly important that we Never Forget the tragedies of the Holocaust, but this is accomplished through sustained public discussion, not through manufactured outrage. Instead of vitriol over this imperfect solution, we should be applauding Germany’s attempt and opening our own homes and monuments to the victims of the wars we’ve created.
The author is a former board member of the American Jewish Congress (MD chapter) now living in Germany, and is a lecturer on Jewish Concepts of a Peaceful Coexistence in Berlin.
Resettling Refugees: Humanitarianism Over Historicization by Zachary Gallant is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
