A Luftwaffe officer's dagger. My grandad worked in Germany after the war looking after horses. This was given to him by a former German officer as thanks.
WW2 dagger
Contributed by Antiques Roadshow - Tatton
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Exact memory against the contempt of human beings
Holocaust Remembrance Day: 27th of January
I.
The Jewish author Elie Wiesel, who escaped as a young man the torture of Auschwitz, said: "Only the exact memory stops the insanity."
The memory of the victims has to be exact when we look at the historic events in Germany between the 30th of January 1933 and the 8th of May in 1945. The human dignity, core value of the human rights, has been taken away little by little during that period of the Nazi dictatorship.
Does this affect us now even from a distance of time?
II.
The memory has to be even more exact if it is addressed against us on this Holocaust Remembrance Day. Exact memory and analysis of our time from the perspective of the victims of the Nazi violence and the victims of tyranny today are closely connected to each other.
Our mourning should therefore not just be on a point of time or a calming event of political correctness, but also an obligation to prevent violations of the human dignity now and in the future.
III.
However, not all Germans have been collaborators of the Nazis. There were also Germans that stood against the Nazi violence and gave their lives. Sophie Scholl, a young woman of the White Rose resistance movement in Munich that has been condemned to death by the Nazis said:
"Someone must be the first that begins to resist."
This statement also includes an accusation to all Germans that deliberately backed the Nazi dictatorships and went for their false and empty promises entirely built on irrational and unjustified prejudice.
It is not easy for this generation of old Germans to look at their own cowardice between 1933 and 1945.
We today are therefore so sorry for all the victims that still suffer from painful wounds in their biographies or lost their lives senselessly in WWII.