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Hundreds of World Cup supporters visit Nazi camp

Updated: 11/Jul/2006 12:39

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BERLIN (EJP)--- Hundreds of football fans who have spent time in Germany attending the 2006 Fifa World Cup, have been flocking to former concentration camps – discovering a side of the country not generally not seen during the tournament.

Horst Seferens, manager of the Foundation of the Sachenhausen Concentration Camp, located in Oranieneburg, just north of Berlin, told the Berliner Morgenpost daily that there has been a marked rise in visitors to such memorial sites.

The surge in numbers has mostly been generated by visitors from non-European countries, in particular from Latin America.

Nazi connection

According to one tourist from Mexico, most people have a negative impression about Germany – a country shrouded by a grey cloud, weighed down heavily by its past.

“Mexicans connect Germany primarily with its Nazi past,” Ignacio Gomez, of Guadalajara, told Berliner Morgenpost. Gomez said expected Germans to be reserved people because of their history. Instead he found a population that was much easier going than he would have ever expected.

“The people of Berlin were much friendlier than those in Amsterdam,” he said.

What has astounded Gomez and other visitors from around the world has been the extent at which Germany has confronted its past.

Many of the visitors to the Sachenhausen camp have been coming in the jerseys of participating World Cup teams. This is unusual, Seferens told the Morgenpost, noting that he hoped to avoid sensational tourism by enlightening each visitor’s curiosity with a dose of “sober information”.

The camps could be seen as a dose of medicine for many visitors – the shock-effect being one way to wake up football fans to aspects of the real world that they may have been unaware of. Karsten Bauch, of the Sachsenhausen memorial information centre has been calling such visitors his “football patients”.

Early camp

Sachenhausen was one of the first concentration camps set up by the Nazis. It served the National Socialist propaganda regime until 1945. Because of its close proximity to Berlin, it also served as an administrative centre for the other camps around Europe.

Sachenhausen’s history did not stop in 1945. After the war, it continued to be used as an internment camp – but this time by East Germany’s Soviet rulers and, for a short time after its founding, in 1948, also by the secret police of the German Democratic Republic’s regime.

Also, many north-west German concentration camps were used by occupying British military forces to house displaced persons from around Europe. Also, thousands of Jews who had unsuccessfully tried to smuggle their way into British Palestine were interned in these camps upon their being sent back to the ruins of war ravaged Europe.