A row has broken out between the German national soccer team and the country’s leading Jewish organization over whether the players should visit Auschwitz during this summer’s European championships.
Dieter Graumann, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has called on the team to “demonstrate their historical responsibility” and travel to the former Nazi concentration camp close to Krakow in southern Poland, which is hosting the championships together with Ukraine.
Graumann has said a visit by the team of the nation that perpetrated the Holocaust would “be more effective than a thousand commemorative speeches,” and that their failure to go to the camp where 1.2 million people were murdered would be “inconceivable.”
“By doing this, they would be showing the whole world that they are prepared to carry a certain amount of responsibility on their shoulders,” Graumann told a German sports magazine in an interview.
However, the team’s management and the German Football Federation (DFB) have bristled at the suggestion. They have said that while the team are preparing to pay tribute to the victims of the Holocaust, no decision has yet been made as to whether they will travel to the former death camp, which is now a museum.
“Of course we’ll be dealing with this topic with the players, but what form this will take has not been finally decided upon,” said Oliver Bierhoff, the team’s manager.
Henryk Broder, a Polish-born German-Jewish commentator, has waded into the debate with the suggestion that a visit to Auschwitz should be dismissed, not least because it might put the soccer players off their game.
“What are the footballers supposed to do in Auschwitz? Swear that they’re sorry? Explain that this sort of thing can ‘never happen again?’” he wrote in an essay in Der Spiegel. “And has anyone thought about what would happen if the German players visited Auschwitz and became so overcome by emotion that they lost the tournament?”
“The German footballers have no business going to Auschwitz. That is, unless some of them choose to go there on their own and without the cameras, for personal reasons that would make them accountable to no one,” he added.
However, Graumann has said it would be an international embarrassment if the German team avoided Auschwitz, particularly because — as has been reported in the German media — the England team that will be based in nearby Krakow, is planning to visit it during the tournament.
“As a German and a Jew I’d consider it a fatal sign if the English national team visited the former death camp, but the German team stayed away from this place,” he said.
However, while the England team will have its championship headquarters in Krakow, which is just 70km away from Auschwitz, the DFB has pointed out that the German team will be based far away in the Baltic Sea port city of Danzig, which is about 550km north of the concentration camp, making a visit impractical.
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