While in Werdau/Zwickau, Christoph Heubner, the Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee, commented on the pogroms in Lichtenhagen in August 1992 and on this year’s remembrance ceremony as follows:
“Survivors of the Holocaust followed the events, images and reports from Lichtenhagen in August 1992 with horror and sympathy for the afflicted people. To this day survivors of the Holocaust see those days in August 1992 and the pogroms in Rostock-Lichtenhagen as a turning point.
Everything that was thrown at them and their families between 1933 and 1945 in their German home towns, all the hatred, exclusion, persecution, arson attacks and finally murder, suddenly seemed to still be an slumbering element in Germany’s basic attitudes, something that could be unleashed on the streets as a form of murderous hatred with folk festival character in a random witch-hunt against minorities. And so, to a certain extent, the days in Lichtenhagen marked a profound loss of confidence on the part of the ‘strangers’ towards the local citizens and neighbours who could at any time eventually display their true colours and chase the ‘strangers’ out onto the streets. But these days also mark the profound loss of confidence as a result of lacking state and police intervention, whose obvious democratic task it is to protect strangers in our country from the hatred of aggressive, uninhibited and fascistic minorities. Especially in the current situation in Germany with the development of far-right extremism, hatred against minorities and anti-Semitism, we need to ask ourselves one very crucial question when remembering Lichtenhagen:
What would you have done in Lichtenhagen? After all the political debates, learning processes and celebrations in east and west Germany surrounding the collective responsibilities and the behaviour of the individual during the Nazi era, this question clearly stands at the top of the list: What would we have done in Lichtenhagen? What are we doing today?"