'Never Again!': Holocaust Remembrance Faces Mounting Pressure as Survivors Dwindle

Young people climb into a crematorium oven at the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial, laugh, give the Nazi salute and photograph one another. Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, told DW the pictures work as trophies to post online, a boast about breaking the ultimate taboo. He says such incidents have grown more frequent in recent years.

The damage is not only to the young people's own behavior. Memorial trees planted in honor of concentration camp victims have been cut down, Wagner said, and it happens regularly. He finds it particularly despicable because, in his words, it kills those people a second time.

Wagner is part of the curatorial team behind "Never Again! Against Forgetting the Crimes of the Nazi Regime," an exhibition at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany. He says Holocaust remembrance is under pressure and facing intensifying attacks. Critics dismiss it as a "cult of guilt" or "national masochism." With right-wing populism rising and historical revisionism becoming more common, he worries about how Germany will remember the people the Nazi regime murdered, and about the future of democracy. Soon there will be no survivors left to tell what happened.

He hopes the show will reach even people who are not already convinced that confronting Nazi crimes matters. Memorial sites draw such visitors too, many of them students. "Let's not kid ourselves," he said, when a teacher announces a trip, it is mandatory. To young people the Nazi era feels remote, and being told to remember something their grandparents did not experience can feel like an emotional burden. They can practically see the wagging finger, Wagner said, and that does not encourage learning. A two-hour lecture accomplishes little if pupils are not listening, so Buchenwald runs full-day programs in which students examine historical sources together and work out the meaning themselves. The next step, he said, is to show that this chapter is not closed, and visitors are encouraged to draw links to current issues such as migration. Discussion of migration has long centered almost entirely on public safety and crime, he said, which broadly marginalizes certain groups, a mechanism that also worked for National Socialism.

Eva Umlauf, 83, a patron of the Bonn exhibition, knows exclusion in its most extreme form. In November 1944, aged 2, she was deported with her pregnant mother and her father from the Novaky labor camp in Slovakia to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She escaped the gas chambers by only days: as the Red Army advanced, the Nazis stopped using them to hide evidence of their crimes. The camp was liberated on January 27, 1945. Her sister Nora was born three months later. Her father, her mother's siblings and her grandparents were murdered.

Eva herself barely survived, suffering tuberculosis, rickets, whooping cough and edema from starvation. A doctor told her mother, "Forget about the child. She won't survive." He was wrong. The family returned to what was then Czechoslovakia and settled in Trencin. Umlauf has no conscious memory of Auschwitz, yet carries the family's trauma. Her mother never spoke of it; the camp was rarely named, but one sentence recurred: "They stayed there." Eva understood that meant they were dead. There was also the number tattooed on her arm, A26959. Her mother taught the girls not to draw attention to being Jewish, as antisemitism was widespread, and the family avoided harassment.

Umlauf became a pediatrician. In the 1960s she met Jakob, a fellow survivor and an architect active in Munich's Jewish community; they married in 1966 and she moved to Germany, a country she could hardly have imagined living in. "I don't hate Germans," she said. "But I cannot forgive. How can you forgive the deaths of 6 million people?" She first spoke publicly in 2011, in a commemorative speech at Auschwitz. A heart attack in 2014 prompted her to write her memoir, first published in 2016, with an English translation in 2024. Since 2025 she has chaired the International Auschwitz Committee. People ask her to tell her story almost daily. Some ask whether she is too old for a tattoo, but she also recalls a young man on the Munich subway who noticed the number and apologized for what his ancestors did.

She did not expect antisemitism to spread again in Europe and the United States, nor the rise of the far-right AfD. She visits schools, overwhelmed by requests, yet says the AfD is growing faster than she can reach students, which makes her wonder if the work is for nothing. "Never again" sounds nice, she said, but it is happening again. In the exhibition catalog she tells young people they are not responsible for their ancestors' crimes but are responsible for the future, and asks them to stay alert and take care of their country. The exhibition runs at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn through May 2, 2027.