The German Leon Schwarzbaum, his survivor, has died at the age of 101 Holocaust and an activist who fought to ensure that the crimes of Nazism in World War II were not forgotten.
“Leon Schwartzbaum died Sunday night through Monday. His loss is a great loss for the common memory. “His rage and his humanity will be missed by all of us,” Christoph Heibner, executive vice president of the Auschwitz International Commission, told APE-MPE.
Schwarzbaum in recent years had testified against Nazis, former concentration camp guards.
Crucial was his testimony in 2016 in the trial of former Auschwitz concentration camp detainee Reinhold Hanning, who was sentenced to five years in prison but died a few months after the verdict was announced without ever going to prison.
At the end of 2021, Schwarzbaum appeared at the trial of 101-year-old former Saxenhausen concentration camp guard Josef Sutz, demanding “justice be done.”
He often expressed his anger that very few Nazi criminals were brought to justice, especially in Germany.
“He did not want hatred, he wanted justice,” the Auschwitz International Commission said.
His story
Schwartbaum was born in Hamburg in 1921 to a Jewish family of Polish descent, but grew up in Benchin in Upper Silesia, now Poland, from where his family moved to Auschwitz in 1943 after the ghetto disintegrated.
He was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust after passing through the Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, from where he was liberated in May 1945 by US troops.
He then lived in West Berlin and worked as an art dealer, while at the same time he did not stop talking about the horror of Nazism at conferences around the world and in schools.
Source: News Beast
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