Germany probes arson at Holocaust memorial site in Berlin

A box of books placed in Berlin's Grunewald Station as part of the Gleis (platform) 17 Holocaust memorial site was set on fire and destroyed by an unknown suspect early on Saturday morning, German police said.

Berlin emergency services responded to complaints filed by an employee of a nearby bakery who was told by two witnesses of the fire at the memorial site, according to a police report.

An unknown suspect was witnessed placing the box, reportedly containing educational books on the rise of fascism in Germany, inside a defunct telephone booth before lighting it on fire, as per the report.

Berlin department firefighters arrived at the scene and extinguished the flames. However, the books were completely destroyed in the fire, police said.

The investigation into the incident was taken over by the Federal Criminal Police Office, Germany's central criminal investigation agency. 

The history behind the Platform 17 Holocaust memorial site

One of the major sites used by the Nazis for the deportation of Jews, the number 17 platform at the German capital's Grunewald railway station saw the forced transport of some 50,000 Jews throughout World War II and the Holocaust, according to Holocaust historians as well the Berlin Municipality.

Jews who were deported from Germany through Grunewald were more often than not sent to labor and concentration camps in Riga, Warsaw, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Theresienstadt. 

Following the war, Platform 17 was abandoned and left unused until 1991, when a concrete wall featuring the imprints of human bodies was erected along the walls of the railway station. Commemorative plates were also placed on the platform as a "reminder of the systematic violence against Jewish people," according to the municipality.

The 186 cast steel plates commemorative plates, embedded in the railroad ballast, were inscribed with the dates and destinations of all deportation trains from Berlin in chronological order, as well as the number of Jews deported in each case.

On January 27, 1998, following a Deutsche Bahn-led competition to determine the design of a permanent memorial site, the winning design was unveiled and the memorial site officially opened to the public.

Violent antisemitism across Germany on the rise

This latest incident of arson comes amid a rise in violent antisemitism across Germany, according to a report released today by a Berlin-based watchdog organization with branches around the country.

Recent antisemitic assaults include violent incidents including shots fired in toward the entrance of the historical rabbi’s house at the Old Synagogue in Essen in November 2022. In April, local police shot an armed, "mentally-confused" assailant who attacked patients and staff at a Jewish hospital in Berlin.