German War Camps Museum Reopens; Jews Turned Away

Five years after neo-Nazis set it ablaze, a barracks at the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp was reopened Sunday as a museum in memory of Holocaust victims.

Elsewhere, 200 demonstrators protested in Gollwitz, 15 miles west of Berlin, against the town’s refusal last month to accept about 60 Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

About 350 people gathered at Oranienburg, about six miles north of Berlin, for the museum opening. The reconstructed barracks was dedicated as a permanent exhibit about Jewish prisoners who were imprisoned at the camp between 1936 and 1945.

About 120,000 of the 204,000 mostly Jewish inmates at Sachsenhausen died of mistreatment and starvation. Many were deported to the death camp at Auschwitz in Poland.

Ignatz Bubis, the chairman of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, warned against radical rightist activity in Germany. There are still those “who deny what happened (in the Holocaust), those who want to forget what happened,” Bubis said.

Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Avi Primor, said relations between Jews and Germans are more open.