Dear Ms. Teege,
I have followed your story with great interest in recent years. First of all, I would like to express my wholehearted appreciation to you. I find the way in which you have faced up to your family history and made the confrontation with your grandfather Amon Göth public to be extraordinarily important and inspiring.
It takes a lot of courage to face such a past and not to gloss over your own family history or let it overwhelm you. You have found a way to deal with your family’s history and to conclude a responsibility for the present from it. That deserves great respect. As the initiator of the international March of Life movement, I fully share this concern. We encourage people around the world to come to work through the culpable entanglements of their families, to seek reconciliation and to take responsibility in the present, especially in view of growing racism and antisemitism. Because I find your story exemplary, I quoted it in one of my books.
For this reason, I welcome the fact that you are also taking your story to schools and telling young people about it, as was the case recently at your reading in Bietigheim-Bissingen. We experience how great the temporal and emotional distance is that young people in particular now have from the Holocaust. For them, history is far removed from them, abstract and is perceived by many only as part of the school curriculum. Your personal story breaks eliminates this distance. It shows very clearly how close the past actually is to us and that the history of the Holocaust does not only consist of victim stories. The stories of the perpetrators and their families – our families – must also be told. It is precisely this that makes visible how people can become entangled in ideology and inhumanity and what responsibility this entails for future generations.
However, I would like to openly contradict you in your recent statement on the war in Gaza. I can well understand that you feel horrified by the suffering of the people in Gaza. Every civilian casualty is one too many. There is nothing to relativize about that.
However, if you call the Israeli military operation genocide, you are crossing a dangerous line. This accusation is not a mere description of the extent of human suffering. It imputes Israel’s intention to destroy the Palestinian people as such. There is no viable basis for this.
Israel is waging war against Hamas, a terrorist organization that murdered, raped and abducted Israeli civilians with unprecedented brutality on October 7, 2023. Their goal was explicitly genocide against the Jewish people. Israel’s declared war goal is to defeat this terrorist group.
Hamas, on the other hand, has systematically embedded its military infrastructure in the civilian infrastructure of the Gaza Strip. Tunnels, weapons depots and command centers are located in the middle of densely populated residential areas and in the immediate vicinity of civilian facilities. This makes this war particularly cruel for the population of Gaza. Civilian casualties cannot be viewed in isolation from this clear war crime committed by Hamas. Anyone who so one-sidedly ascribes responsibility for the suffering to Israel ignores a crucial part of reality.
Israel has taken an extraordinary number of measures to warn, evacuate and care for civilians. These measures were able to prevent many civilian casualties, but also many not. Israeli military action must be examined just as critically as in other countries. There is no question about that. But the insinuation of genocide completely ignores Israel’s efforts, some of which are unprecedented, and levels out the particularly difficult starting position.
The accusation of genocide is therefore not an appropriate description of this war. It is a propaganda narrative that turns reality upside down: the fight against a terrorist organization becomes a campaign of annihilation against an entire people, and the state of Israel, which enables Jews to protect and self-determine after centuries of persecution, is made the perpetrator.
This is not without consequences. On the basis of this narrative, synagogues are attacked in Europe, the USA and Australia, Jewish people are threatened and attacked, and in some cases even murdered. Jews are held responsible for the war and have to justify Israel’s right to exist. The accusation of genocide has long since become an instrument with which Israel is demonized and Jewish life is put under pressure worldwide. This is a development that we must not accept in silence.
That is precisely why I would like to ask you: Are you aware of the effect your words have when you, as a descendant of one of the best-known Nazi perpetrators, use the term genocide against Israel? Your voice carries weight. People listen to you because you have dealt with the history of the Holocaust in a credible and personal way. This makes the responsibility associated with this public voice all the greater.
I am not writing these lines to question your history or your work. On the contrary, I very much hope that you will continue your important work and continue to motivate people to face history. Precisely because I appreciate your personal confrontation with the past so much, I would like to encourage you to take a close look at the current dispute over Israel and not to allow yourself to be taken in by a narrative that denies the Jewish state the right to self-defense and ultimately its legitimacy.
Best regards,
Jobst Bittner