Deutsche Bahn agrees to Holocaust exhibition 01/12/2006 00:00

1 December 2006

Berlin (dpa) - Germany's state-owned national railway bowed to government appeals on Friday and agreed to allow an exhibition on Nazi deportations to be shown at train stations across the country.

Deutsche Bahn said in statement issued jointly with the transport ministry that the photographs and papers on Jews sent to concentration camps could go on display at railway stations "and their immediate vicinity."

Deutsche Bahn chief executive Hartmut Mehdorn had previously resisted the idea, arguing that railway stations were not the right place for such a serious topic "because they are too crowded and people are in too much of a hurry to concentrate."

But he relented after appeals from Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee and Wolfgang Thierse, deputy speaker of the German lower house of parliament.

The exhibition focusing on the "immeasurable suffering of deported Jewish children" will open in Berlin on January 27, 2008 - the day on which Germany remembers the victims of the Nazis.

French anti-Nazi campaigner Beate Klarsfeld has been asked to provide material for the exhibition, which will also include exhibits from the railway's own museum in Nuremberg.

Klarsfeld's own exhibition on the fate of 11,000 deported Jewish children has already been shown at 18 French railway stations. She had wanted it shown at stations in Germany where the children were deported on trains operated by the state railways' predecessor, the Reichsbahn.

A cultural affairs spokeswoman for the co-ruling Social Democrats welcomed Friday's decision, saying it "showed Deutsche Bahn possessed the necessary qualities to come to terms with its own history".

Monika Griefahn said that showing the pictures at railway stations would confront people with the same public places where the deportations were carried out during Nazi rule.

DPA

Subject: German news