Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier discussed the "Penzberg Murder Night" with Penzberg high school students in a video conference.
The background was the new youth novel by Kirsten Boie, which describes April 28, 1945 from the perspective of three young people.
Wednesday will mark the 76th anniversary of the "night of murder".
Penzberg - 76 years ago, shortly before the end of the war, Wehrmacht soldiers and a fanatical Nazi group ("werewolf") murdered 16 men and women in Penzberg, including Hans Rummer and several of his colleagues, who had deposed the Nazi mayor, to the mine to save the destruction.
The Hamburg writer Kirsten Boie recently published the book “Dark Night” in which she prepared the events for young readers based on three fictional young people who witnessed the crimes.
Federal President: Conversation with students about Kirsten Boie's “Dark Night” book
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his wife Elke Büdenbender took this as an opportunity to talk to Penzberg high school students in a video conference about the book and the events of the "Penzberg Murder Night" on Monday morning. The mood in Germany at the time was shaped by the fact that war and tyranny would soon end, said Steinmeier. But there were also days in which fanaticism did not end. According to the Federal President, Penzberg stands for numerous other places where crimes were committed in the last days of the war. Crimes in which neighbors are betrayed or murdered by neighbors and the many Germans are not known.
He himself read a lot about such crimes, said the Federal President.
He only found out about the "Penzberger Murder Night" when he was in Penzberg in December 2019 (he visited the mosque and the town hall at the time).
Now he has also come across the book by Kirsten Boie.
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In the meeting room of the Penzberg town hall: high school students and mayor Stefan Korpan.
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In the epilogue of her book, the writer Boie said that the culture of remembrance in Penzberg was "very reserved". A claim that Elke Büdenbender formulated on Monday as a question to the young people. They said they had found out about the "night of the murder" in class. One girl said she knew about it from a family that included a survivor of the night of the murder. In any case, all nine students were well informed. The three twelfth graders and six tenth graders had previously dealt with this in various projects with their history teacher Michaela Wagner. According to one of the students, the book made the events even more understandable. "It helps to understand how people could let that happen." His opinion is that you "can't remember it enough",because it was "a crime of unimaginable proportions", "moreover committed by average normal people".
While reading he noticed, said one young person, "how happy one can be to be able to live in this day and age". The book described the group as "eternal contemporary witnesses". Mayor Stefan Korpan called the book by Kirsten Boie, who read a few passages from it on Monday, valuable. Regarding the culture of remembrance in Penzberg, Korpan said that there has been a memorial at the site of the shootings since 1948, many books have been written and the murdered have been made honorary citizens, an annual memorial service takes place at the cemetery and a bronze plaque is now being unveiled on Wednesday on the town square. What touched him the most: a box with a rope on which a victim was hanged. It is on display in the museum.