Why Yad Vashem is coming to Germany
"Remember" — every child in Israel knows the meaning of this Jewish commandment: Never forget the Holocaust. Now Yad Vashem wants to make sure people
"Remember" — every child in Israel knows the meaning of this Jewish commandment: Never forget the Holocaust. Now Yad Vashem wants to make sure people in Germany remember it too. Memory of the Holocaust may be omnipresent in Israel, but it is fading elsewhere, even in the country where it was planned and by whom it was carried out. Some 80 years after the end of World War II, a 2025 survey by the Jewish Claims Conference found that roughly 10 to 12% of young adults in Germany had never heard the word "Holocaust." The same study found that around 40% of 18- to 29-year-olds in Germany did not know that six million Jews were murdered during the Nazi era. That is one of the reasons Yad Vashem — the world's largest Holocaust memorial, based in Jerusalem — is establishing a branch in Germany. It is the first outside Israel. "We do not come to Germany in order to strengthen German democracy or in order to warn against the rise of an extreme right party in Germany," Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan tells DW. "We come to teach about the Holocaust. Educating is a tool in the fight against antisemitism. But I have no doubt that our work will strengthen German democracy and will be a weapon in warning against the rise of a political party that has its roots in in the Nazi ideology, and I will not hesitate to mention it as explicitly: the AfD." Jewish women and children arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945; Very few survived the death camp Image: United Archives International/IMAGO The poison of antisemitism Jews have been stigmatized and persecuted for more than 2,000 years. They were scapegoated by the Romans during political crises, stigmatized by Christians as "killers of God" and targeted in the Middle Ages by the myth of the Jewish "ritual murder" of Christian children, which triggered show trials and bloody pogroms. Antisemitism as a racist ideology ultimately reached its apex in the Holocaust. "I thought that after the Shoah and the devastation that it brought to Europe — not only to the Jewish people, but to Germany and to Europe — I thought that at least we would have, I don't know, 100, 200 years free of antisemitism.
But yeah, as we see, that it isn't the case, unfortunately," says Dayan. "In a polarized world as we see it in many societies today, the hatred of Jews and the Jewish state has become the lingua franca of all extremists in the world." Dani Dayan developed the idea for a German branch of Yad Vashem in 2023, before the massacre of October 7 Image: Kay Nietfeld/dpa/picture alliance Antisemitic attacks are on the rise in Germany, too. The decision to open the Yad Vashem education center in downtown Munich was driven in part by the city's high security standards. Munich's historical significance as the birthplace of the Nazi movement was not the determinant factor — yet the center will be housed in a building on the central Karolinenplatz, the former headquarters of the Nazi Party's Supreme Party Court. There are also plans to open a second branch in Leipzig. As Dayan emphasizes, these venues are not intended solely for Bavaria and Saxony — they are meant for audiences from across Germany. "It's very important to bring the Jewish perspective of the Holocaust, the perspective of the victims and the survivors to Germany, the land of the perpetrators," he says. The Yad Vashem Education Center is scheduled to open in this building in Munich in 2028 Image: Sven Hoppe/dpa/picture alliance Germany already has no shortage of memorials, museums and monuments dedicated to the horrors of the Holocaust. So what will the Yad Vashem in Munich do differently? "It is not intended as a museum with exhibits and original artifacts belonging to murdered Jews," emphasizes Dayn, but rather as an interactive educational center. Details about what that will look like in practice remain scarce. Meron Mendel, a German-Israeli journalist and director of the Anne Frank Educational Center in Frankfurt, has questioned why the German Yad Vashem branches weren't integrated into existing institutions specializing in Holocaust education, such as the Nazi Documentation Center in Munich. After all, Dayan has praised Germany's efforts to come to terms with Nazi crimes. Chancellor Friedrich Merz, shown here at a wreath-laying ceremony at Yad Vashem in 2025, welcomes the project Image: Michael Kappeler/dpa/picture alliance When the entrepreneur and former US government representative Elon Musk stated at an AfD party conference in January 2025 that Germany should leave its culture of remembrance behind, Dayan was appalled.
The BriefWire