Theft of Auschwitz camp sign 'desecrates memory of dead'

Published on Friday 18 December 2009 22:09

THE infamous iron sign over the gate of the former Auschwitz death camp, with the words Arbeit Macht Frei – German for "Work Sets You Free" – has been stolen.

Police believe it was taken between 3:30am and 5am yesterday, when museum guards saw it was missing and alerted police.

Fears were raised that the sign could have been stolen by neo-Nazis in an attempt to insult the country's Jewish population.

The iron sign, which spanned a gate at the main entrance to the memorial site in southern Poland, was removed by being unscrewed on one side and ripped off on the other.

Police have launched an intensive search. They said last night there were no suspects, but they were pursuing several theories.

Criminal investigators and search dogs were sent to the grounds of the vast former death camp, whose barracks, watchtowers and ruins of gas chambers stand as testament to the atrocities inflicted by the Nazis on Jews, gypsies and others.

The slogan Arbeit Macht Frei was used at the entrances to other Nazi camps, including Dachau and Sachsenhausen. The long curving sign at Auschwitz is the best known. Between 1940 and 1945, more than one million people, mostly Jews, were killed or died of starvation and disease while carrying out forced labour at the camp, which the Nazis built in occupied Poland.

Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust remembrance group, said: "The theft of such a symbolic object is an attack on the memory of the Holocaust, and an escalation from those elements that would like to return us to darker days.

"I call on all enlightened forces in the world who fight against antisemitism, racism, xenophobia and the hatred of the other to join together to combat these trends."

Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said he had trouble imagining who would want to steal the sign.

"If they are pranksters, they'd have to be sick pranksters, or someone with a political agenda," he said.

"But whoever has done it has desecrated world memory."

He speculated that the theft could have been committed by neo-Nazi extremists, or even by people scheming to sell the sign on the black market.

"There's a market for everything," he said, adding that it was "like stealing a Picasso". But he added: "Even a hot Picasso you could try to move after ten years – but not this."

An exact replica of the sign, produced when the original underwent restoration work years ago, was quickly hung in its place.

In Brussels, European Parliament president Jerzy Buzek, a former Polish prime minister, appealed to the thieves to return the sign.

"Give it back out of respect for the suffering of over a million victims, murdered in this Nazi camp, the biggest cemetery of humankind," he said.

Polish president Lech Kaczynski said he was "shaken and outraged" by the theft of a "world-known symbol of Nazi cynicism and cruelty". He appealed to all Poles for help finding it.

Police were offering a 5,000 zloty (1,000) reward for public tip-offs about the thieves.

In Jerusalem, the International Auschwitz Committee said the theft "deeply unsettles the survivors".