Albrecht Weinberg, who survived a series of Nazi concentration and death camps and lost most of his family in the Holocaust before returning to Germany in his 80s, has died.
Weinberg died in Leer, north-western Germany, weeks after his 101st birthday and the premiere of a film about his life, Es Ist Immer in Meinem Kopf (It Is Always in My Head).
“Since returning from New York to his east Frisian home 14 years ago, Albrecht recounted tirelessly and with incredible energy his terrible experiences during the Nazi era and warned again and again against forgetting,” said Leer’s mayor, Claus-Peter Horst, on Tuesday.
Weinberg, who was born in Rhauderfehn, near Leer, on 7 March 1925, survived incarceration at the Auschwitz, Mittelbau-Dora and Bergen-Belsen camps as well as three death marches at the end of the second world war. He spent years teaching high school students and others about the horrors he had lived through.
Speaking last year, Weinberg said the memories of his wartime experiences still haunted him: “I sleep with it, I wake up with it, I sweat, I have nightmares, that is my present.”
He said he worried what would happen when he was no longer around to bear witness. “When my generation is not in this world any more, when we disappear from the world, then the next generation can only read it out of the book.”
Weinberg was awarded Germany’s order of merit in 2017 but handed it back last year when a parliamentary vote calling for many more migrants to be turned back at Germany’s borders passed with the help of a far-right party. The motion was put forward by Friedrich Merz, who is now the country’s chancellor.
Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, said in a post on X that he knew Weinberg well and paid tribute to him as “a bridge – between past and present, between pain and hope, between the dead he could never forget and the young people whom he encouraged to seek the truth”.