“For decades, Germany remained in silence, confronting its Nazi past only reluctantly. It wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that a meaningful shift towards remembrance and commemoration truly began.”
These were the powerful words of Elke Gryglewski, Director of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation, as she opened the first-ever UN study tour on Nazi racism, the Holocaust, and its lasting impact on today’s society. Organised by the Foundation, this tour brought together UN communications staff from across five continents as part of the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme, aimed at “mobilizing civil society for Holocaust remembrance and education to help prevent future acts of genocides.”
This initiative underscores the UN’s commitment to combating hate speech, antisemitism, disinformation, and racism—an effort that is as critical now as ever. Next year will mark 80 years since the liberation of Europe from Nazi rule, making this tour especially timely. The relevance of this study tour becomes even more striking in the recent political context, including the rise of the far-right in Germany, which on September 2024 won a state election in Thuringia for the first time in post-Second World War Germany.
Over the five days spent in Lower Saxony, participants delved into the harrowing history of Nazi Germany, visiting memorial sites that told the stories of both the victims and their perpetrators.
These powerful narratives, alongside the passionate dedication of historians leading the tours, left a lasting impact on the UN staff members, inspiring them to carry the legacy of Holocaust survivors forward and to promote mutual respect, human rights, and remembrance in their communications around the world.
An overview of the sites…
The trip began with a guided tour of Celle, home to the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation, focusing on the theme “Celle under the Nazis and its Aftermath.”
“Celle was an ordinary town where the rise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) unfolded just as it did everywhere else in Germany,” remarked Christian Wolpers, responsible for educational programmes at the Foundation.
His words resonated deeply with the participants throughout the week, as they underscored a sobering truth: the atrocities of the Nazi regime were not confined to a few cities, but spread across every ordinary German town.
As elsewhere, in Celle, victims and perpetrators had lived side by side before the Holocaust. As elsewhere, in Celle the Nazis persecuted political opponents and systematically discriminated against those the Nazis classified as “racially inferior”. In Celle, many of the Jewish inhabitants had lived there for generations and contributed to the broader community. The Nazis stripped them of their rights, deported them to labour camps, ghettos and finally death camps.
So-called “Stumbling stones”, engraved with the name of a victim, are embedded in Celle’s pavements outside where they had lived before the Holocaust, and serve as reminders of the homes, lives, and dreams destroyed by the Nazi regime.
The tour also visited Celle’s synagogue, which suffered heavily during the November Pogrom of 1938, when the Nazis shattered the building’s interior and its historic stained-glass windows.
The tour concluded at the memorial for the Celle Massacre of 8 April, 1945. The massacre took place just days before the end of the war. Atleast 170 concentration camp inmates were murdered by SS guards, policemen, and civilians after escaping a train. This event further emphasised the complicity of ordinary townspeople in the horrors of the Nazi era. Such massacres occurred in other towns in Germany.
At the next stop, the Zeitzentrum Zivilcourage in Hanover, visitors were invited to explore history through powerful stories and photographs of victims, acts of resistance, and the roles of perpetrators. The interactive exhibition that shows lives lived before the Holocaust and the subsequent impact of the Holocaust is an invitation to not only reflect on the past but also to draw parallels to present-day challenges, to foster civil courage and to confront injustice and discrimination.
“People were acting within the legal framework of that time. It takes immense courage to oppose discriminatory laws,” explains Jens Binner, the Centre’s Director and historian. “Less than 1% of German society resisted during the Nazi regime, and that includes something as simple as referring to forced labourers by name instead of number. This is why it is crucial to act before a dictatorship takes root, because only a few will dare to stand up.”
UN staff then visited a site located near Hamelin: Bückeberg, which gained infamy as the site of the annual Nazi “Reich Harvest Festival” from 1933 to 1937, a massive Nazi propaganda spectacle designed to display the regime’s strength and unity.
The site illustrates how Nazi propaganda was orchestrated, even broadcast live, as the Nazis leveraged a traditional farmers’ festival to attract a wide range of audiences. At its peak, the event drew over one million visitors, including foreign diplomats traveling by train from across Germany. Hitler used the occasion to manipulate the public and international opinion.
One of the most harrowing visits during this tour was to the “Euthanasia” Memorial in Lüneburg, a site where the Nazi regime systematically targeted and murdered individuals with physical and mental disabilities. .
From 1940 to 1945, many patients from the Lüneberg State Institute were forcibly transported to their deaths or killed on-site as part of the “T4 programme”, the name of the covert initiative in Nazi Germany.
In 1941, the programme extended to children with disabilities, who were killed in the children’s ward by doctors and nurses at Lüneburg State Institute through starvation, medication, or “gas buses”.
Even after the war ended in this area, the killings continued. Children were admitted to the children’s department until mid-August 1945, and its medical doctor Max Bräuner remained in office until 25 August 1945. Historians consider it likely that killings persisted during this time. The mortality rate in May and June 1945 remained very high, with an overall rate of 35% for the year, gradually decreasing over the next two years. Patients continued to die due to years of intentional malnutrition and poor medical care inflicted by the medical personnel during the War.
Today, the site remains an active psychiatric centre with 500 patients. For the well-being of current patients, the fact that this is a memorial site, is not prominently visible.
The tour also included visits to two camp sites: Sandbostel and Bergen-Belsen. “In all of Germany, there were about 1,000 camps, including 23 main camps and various subcamps, often located near factories. German citizens would see the prisoners of war (POWs) traveling to and from work; it was impossible not to know,” said Mattis Binner, who oversees international exchange programmes and educational workshops at the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation.
The Sandbostel Memorial Site commemorates the victims of Sandbostel Prisoner of War (POW) and concentration camp (“Stalag X B”). Once covering 35 acres and housing over 150 buildings, only a small portion of the camp remains today.
By the end of the war, more than 300,000 POWs, civilian prisoners and military internees from over 55 countries had passed through Stalag X B.
Although the Nazis were required to follow the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of POWs, their racist ideology shaped the treatment of prisoners. Soviet POWs, in particular, had little chance of survival, often succumbing to starvation.
Fences separated Soviet POWs from other groups, including prisoners from more than 100 different countries. The exact number of Soviet prisoners who died in military district X B remains unknown, but at least 5,000 lie in mass graves at the camp cemetery in Sandbostel alone.
The Bergen-Belsen Memorial Site was the last visit of the study tour. The site is located near the town of Bergen and is dedicated to commemorating the victims of the POWs’ camp (1940-1945) and the SS concentration camp, which operated from April 1943 to April 1945. The site also honours the Displaced Persons (DP) camp, which operated from 1945 to 1950.
During the time of the Belsen POW camp and in two similar adjacent POW camps about 50.000 POWs mainly from the Soviet Union died, and in the concentration camp at least 52,000 Jews, political prisoners, and other persecuted people perished. Anne and Margot Frank succumbed to typhus in the camp and died there in February 1945. Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, Melissa Fleming, who joined the tour for this visit, honoured their memory on the site.
Personal testimonies, historical documents, and photographs at the memorial offer a stark reminder of the camp’s brutal history, the suffering endured by its prisoners, and the broader horrors of the Holocaust. Even after the liberation of the camp, and the establishment of the displaced persons camp, many people died due to the weakened state inflicted by Nazis.
The site also includes mass graves. The exact number of bodies buried there remains unknown.
During the tour, the guide spoke about Francine Christophe, a Bergen-Belsen survivor born in 1933, who shared her complex emotions when eventually returning to the camp, parts of which are covered in purple heather flowers in summer. Her poignant words capture how she gave found a way to regard a place in her mind to a the camp that was marked by unimaginable suffering, as a place where she was could feel proud of how she had endured in the face of inhumanity: “I’d wanted to go for a long time, but I’d wanted to go with my husband, and he didn’t want to because it would have been too painful for him. Then, one day, when we were on a nice little trip, we were passing nearby, and I said to him, ‘Listen, we’re too close not to go there. Don’t come with me into the camp if you can’t, but I need to go. I feel this urge to go.’ The next day, we were there when the camp opened. My husband ended up coming with me after all. I think it was more painful for him than for me. I was fine, mostly because it was so beautiful. It was so beautiful that I was almost proud of it.”
Currently, all these memorials offer a range of educational programmes designed for students, educators, and the general public, including workshops, lectures, guided tours, and seminars that encourage critical thinking, active participation, and promote historical awareness. These activities aim to honour the memory of the victims, foster discussions about justice and the lessons of history, and emphasise the importance of human rights and mutual respect.
The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme| United Nations
