The controversial reconstruction of a German church linked to Hitler and Nazism reached a major milestone Thursday with the inauguration of its brand new tower in the centre of Potsdam, about 30 kilometres (20 miles) from Berlin.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who attended the ceremony, acknowledged that the church recalled “painful and tragic episodes” from Germany’s past while justifying the renovation.
“A place that is no longer there will not facilitate critical memory work,” he said.
Witness to the opposition that the project has aroused for years: around a hundred people demonstrated peacefully near the building.
The history of the Garrison Church in Potsdam, built between 1733 and 1735 by order of Frederick Ier Prussia, almost completely destroyed by Allied bombing in April 1945, is particularly busy.
It was this Protestant temple that the Nazis chose, on March 21, 1933, for the inaugural session of the Parliament resulting from the legislative elections that Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party had just won.
A photograph that has gone down in history shows Hitler, who had been Chancellor for less than two months, welcoming the President of the Reich, the elderly Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, upon his arrival at church.
By choosing this church where the tombs of Frederick I are locateder and his son Frederick II, Hitler intended to symbolically position himself as the heir to the kings who had made Prussia great.
Addressed to President Steinmeier, a petition signed by thousands of people denounces “a construction which is not only a central symbol of Prussian-German nationalism but also of the extreme right.”
“We are not hiding the dark areas of the past, but we are making them visible in order to learn from them,” Steinmeier insisted on Thursday.
An exhibition in the building is intended to educate visitors about the site’s storied past.
The new church, the renovation of which is not yet complete, “is not a place of veneration of militarism, nationalism and the authoritarian state,” the head of state insisted.
He is thus sending a message to the far right and in particular to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is leading the polls ahead of the regional elections to be held on 22 September in the state of Brandenburg, whose capital is Potsdam.
The restoration of the Garrison Church, the last remains of which were razed in the late 1960s at the request of the East German authorities (Potsdam being in the communist GDR), is largely financed by the federal state.