Hamburg appeal for Holocaust Remembrance Day: Don’t just remember St. Nevermind’s Day

The Holocaust is not just concentration camps: everywhere in Germany there are places from which the extermination originated. On Remembrance Day this Tuesday, this will once again become a little more visible through numerous events. In Hamburg, for example, you can take a tour of HafenCity to commemorate the 8,000 Jews, Sinti and Roma who were deported from Hanover train station between 1941 and 1945: to ghettos, concentration and extermination camps.

The names of the deportees are written on 20 plaques at Lohseplatz. A deep joint runs 350 meters through the park along the old rail tracks and leads – well: through the park. Actually, she should have a goal.

From 2026, that’s what it says on the website Memorials in Hamburgthere will be a new documentation center here; The permanent exhibition there also wants to take a look at perpetrators and profiteers: What scope for action would the majority society have had? An exciting question – but in 2026, that won’t happen anymore.

Not even in 2027, he suspects Historian Marut G. Perle from the advisory board of the Auschwitz Committee, “maybe not even 2028”. There is still no planning application for the building. “The Hannoverscher Bahnhof Documentation Center must not fail” – 44 members of Nazi victims’ associations, researchers and politicians have now made a joint appeal with this tenor to Hamburg’s First Mayor Peter Tschentscher (SPD) and his Senate on Holocaust Remembrance Day: “Don’t break your word,” it says.

In the 2025 coalition agreement, the SPD and the Greens committed to realizing the documentation center. The problem: The city currently has no control over this. The call is therefore also addressed to the Hamburg investor Harm Müller-Spreer: “End the planning freeze, stand by the promises you made in the donation agreement and do not cause any further damage to the culture of remembrance in your hometown of Hamburg,” appeal the signatories.

The investor Harm Müller-Spreer actually wanted to donate the building to the city for five million euros from his private assets. Not entirely voluntary: Müller-Spreer actually should have housed the memorial in his newly built office complex. When the city sold him the property at Lohsepark, the purchase agreement included a permanent use agreement for the future memorial – 1,000 square meters for a full 200 years.

But then the first tenants moved in in 2021, including Wintershall-DEA – a subsidiary of BASF, a successor company to IG Farben, which supplied Zyklon B for the extermination camps during the Nazi era. It was clear that Müller-Spreer thereby violated the conditions of the long-term use agreement; It said that the building should not be used in a way “that, in the eyes of the victims (…) conflicts with the purpose of the (…) documentation center.”

Investor speaks of “heart’s desire” – and doesn’t do anything

The victims’ associations protested, investor Müller-Spreers was cautious. In the end, a different agreement was reached: there should be a separate memorial site, the building for it donated by Müller-Spreers. The city released the investor from the old usage agreement. Müller-Spreer announced that the project was a “heartfelt wish” for him, a “great honor” and an “inner obligation”.

But there has been a standstill since autumn 2024: tax reasons are responsible, as a small inquiry from the left-wing faction in September 2025 revealed. Apparently the investor wants to have his expenses credited immediately not until the memorial is completed and a donation receipt is issued wait.

Details on the tax issue are not known, but Müller-Spreer does not want to continue with the preliminary planning until it is clarified. The realization of the documentation center is time-sensitive: only a few victims who were sent here are still alive. Something else is pressing: the donation agreement between the city and the investor allows both to exit the contract if the building permit is not received by the end of February 2028. Historian Perle from the Auschwitz Committee considers the tax debate to be unworthy. “If it’s really a matter close to Müller-Spreer’s heart, it shouldn’t fail because of a popular tax issue.”

Especially since Müller-Spreer took on a personal burden through the donation agreement – but gained a lot in terms of business: the city removed the right of permanent use for 200 years from the contract for his office building. “I suspect that he is very happy that he no longer has this long-term use in the contract,” says Perle. “Mr. Müller-Spreer is a sailor. I think he can do it well: he is agile and knows how best to sail against the wind and with the wind in order to always head for the point that is best for him.”

But couldn’t the city still put an end to the misery – and become the developer itself? “The city assumes that the contractual partner will fulfill its contractually agreed obligations and does not intend to exempt him from this,” replies the Hamburg cultural authority. Historian Perle also points out that if she were to take action herself, she would probably have to put the construction contract out to tender and start the planning work all over again.

“I would like this penny-pinching to finally stop,” he says. I hope that the city and the investor will get their act together and finally bring this to an end.” With the appeal, says the historian from the Auschwitz Committee, “we want to remind everyone of their responsibility.”