Author:
Publication: The New York Times
Date: September 7, 2002
A firebomb badly damaged a Holocaust
museum near the northeast German town of Wittstock, the Brandenburg State
police said today.
Police officials posted a $10,000
reward for information leading to an arrest in the attack on Thursday on
the Belower Forest Museum. Half the museum's exhibition space was destroyed,
and swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti were painted in pink on a nearby
monument's walls.
The museum's spokesman, Horst Seserens,
said: "We were quite lucky because the police were very fast and stopped
the fire. A few minutes more and the whole building would have burned down."
The vandals also painted an anti-Semitic
slogan, "Jews have short legs," a twist on the German saying that "lies
have short legs." Mr. Seserens said the intended message was that "the
Holocaust is a lie."
The Belower Forest memorial is dedicated
to the victims of the Nazi death marches of the spring of 1945, when the
Nazis emptied concentration camps that were about to be liberated by the
advancing Soviet Army and forced some 45,000 inmates to march farther into
Germany. Thousands died, just days before the camps were liberated by Soviet
and American troops.
