Germany has launched a £8.5 million drive to send more schoolchildren to visit former Nazi concentration camps like Auschwitz in a frantic endeavour to stop memories of the Holocaust fading.
The initial annual budget has now been doubled to £3 million after emergency backing was secured from a private foundation. The Bethe Foundation has also pledged an additional £8.5 million over five years, allowing the number of trips to the chilling sites to double.
Family Minister Karin Prien warned that as Holocaust survivors are dying, the horror of Nazi crimes is at risk of disappearing from public memory. She said that only direct exposure to Germany’s dark history, by visiting camps like Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor, can truly convey the full scale of the atrocities.
She said: “It is particularly valuable when young people experience history directly and immediately at authentic sites of Nazi crimes and develop a sense of responsibility for our democracy from it. The programmes will be reviewed with regard to target achievement and impact.”
And she added: “Visiting a concentration camp alone doesn’t make someone an anti-fascist or a democrat.” It’s about understanding how such a thing could arise. The Nazi regime of terror and the murder of the Jews didn’t begin in Auschwitz. It began with a gradual process of disenfranchisement, dehumanisation, and expropriation.”
Since 2010, over 40,000 German students have participated in the programme. But officials now hope the expansion will prevent what they fear is a growing detachment from this crucial chapter in the country’s history.
During a visit to Israel in October 2025, Prien emphasised that the problem is also extremely personal for her, revealing that even members of her own family were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Speaking at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, she described the experience as “always deeply moving”.
Prien is the first German federal minister to talk about her Jewish roots openly while in office. She said every visit to the Holocaust memorial triggers renewed shock, particularly as the number of living survivors continues to fall.
She is now backing plans to establish a Yad Vashem-linked education centre in Germany, with possible locations including the southern state of Bavaria, the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia or the eastern state of Saxony. A definitive decision is anticipated in 2026.
Prien also held talks with Israeli Education Minister Joav Kisch, striving to revitalise the youth exchange programmes which were disrupted by the ferocity of the Gaza conflict, arguing that direct international engagement is now more vital than ever to preserve historical truth.
More than 12,000 young people are expected to visit former Nazi execution camps each year.
It’s a place that everyone needs to go and see at some point in their life, to see it with your own eyes and to feel the essence of wickedness that thousands of Jews experienced; that feeling will stick with you forever, but atrocities happen everywhere, and they should be addressed as well, to show that people very easily forget, and still carry on causing more wars.
Attending these camps, particularly as a young child, undoubtedly sends a very direct message to our kids. No birds fly across the camps; you can hear them outside, but not inside. However, we must remember that what happened in the past does not justify what is happening today.
We have Remembrance Sunday in the UK, but there’s no point remembering if we don’t learn from it. Of course, there will always be Nazis around; they just look different now.
Nobody deserves to be killed in war, and nothing justifies extermination. Nothing justifies seeing mangled children being pulled from rubble, and we must remember that this war that is going on between the Israeli’s and Palestine, and which has been going on for a very long time, and is not justifiable, and the Jew’s should remember the atrocities that happened in the camps – Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau to name a few.
Of course, there will always be Holocaust deniers, arguing that Nazi Germany and its collaborators did not perpetrate genocide against Jews during World War II, but these deniers are all willfully blind – it happened!
30,000 Jewish men were sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and other concentration camps. During the Holocaust, over 100,000 women were imprisoned in Ravensbrück, and there were numerous more. Obviously, when the war ended, and people were liberated, many men and women survived the camps, among them children. Are the deniers trying to tell us that they all got together in one room to get their stories straight? Someone would have slipped up by now!
However, it doesn’t excuse the fact that war is still going on – I’d say Israel, but to me it’s Palestine and always will be!
There is a book that everyone should read called ‘The Freedom Writers Diary,’ by teacher Erin Gruwell. Her students compiled a book out of real diary entries about their lives that they wrote in their English class at Woodrow Wilson Classical High School in Long Beach, California.
The book covers segregation and division, and that is all that war is: segregation and division, and the sheer enjoyment of control by another person or faction. Division refers to the act of separating or splitting something into parts, while segregation involves the separation of people based on certain characteristics, such as race, gender, or religion.
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