For some four years now I volunteer as a webmaster for shoa.de, one of the largest german Holocaust ressource sites. I moved it from the original static HTML pages to Mambo and through various Joomla Versions. When I was finally prepared to give on Joomla version 1.5 came along with the wonderful beez template, and I decided to give Joomla another go. Tomorrow will be the official relaunch on a new server, and with a new name, too. Shoa.de will still work (it is after all the name of the registered non-profit), but the main domain will be  the not particularly original zukunft-braucht-erinnerung.de.

I had hoped to make a bit of an event from the relaunch, but as things are going (I’m terribly busy and paid work goes first) I’m glad that I made it at all, and there are a lot of things left to do – the old page used tables for image captions that now need to be removed, some things (like pagination) are not styled at all, we purchased a cache component that I have been unable to get to work so far etc.  But still the new site is already looking much better than the old one, and now we have at least a solid base from which we can work our way towards accessibility.

So, why I am doing this?

Building or re-building a large website is a lot of work, even if you’re part of a team (graphics design was done by Thorsten Kaiser,  content editing is done mainly by shoa.de founder Stefan Mannes and his company kakoii.de and several other volunteers).

It is occasionally speculated in online forums (what is the plural of “forum” ?) that shoa.de is either heavily subsidized by the german federal government or that we are paid for by the Israel Mossad as part of a mission to make the innocent german people feel bad about themselves.

As they say, if I’m part of a conspiracy then where is my share?

In fact that shoa.de runs at all is mostly by courtesy of Thomas Kochler from the hosting company schuko.net, who donated the server and pays for our traffic. If you are looking for reliable and competent hosting in Germany you should consider him, it’s a tad more expensive than the big companies but you will get excellent service. Then there are fees from the members of the non profit (it think it’s 15 Euro per year and member), we got a little money when the portal won an award two years ago, and we get the occasional donation (though that’s usually not money – for example various publishing companies donated prices for a school contest we arranged). And even if there was money the charter of the non-profit forbids that we pay money to ourselves.

So if it’s not for the money why am I, why are we doing this ? After all the holocaust happened a long long time ago, isn’t it time to move on, put the memories to a rest, bla bla bla.

The answer is rather simple. Nazism, fascim, antisemitism in Germany are not things of the past. Quite on the contrary, in some areas at least they seem to be on the rise. The problem are not so much the violent fascist thugs, even if they routinely maim or kill foreigners or lefties. After all there are laws against assault and murder, and Germany has a police force that would be quite capable to enforce them. The problem is a form of public acceptance – it is widely believed that the political views of Nazism are understandable and justfied, and that just its’ methods are a little bit too extreme [1].

Well, I’m not going to accept it [2]. That Nazis should be allowed to go on while the people who are against Nazis should stop is, to me, unthinkable.

That’s why.

1. And of course in the aftermath of the german unification most of the left suffered a case of sudden spinelessness and converted to views that had been previously held only by the extremist right - "the boat is full" (so no more immigration), "we must protect our industry against jewish reparation claims" etc. So there is no real counterweight to the right anymore.
2. And why would I? That the left are the losers of history is not because there is something wrong with being against nazis, or longing for a better world. It's because traditionally lefties are, in their majority,  wimps who would betray their every conviction and their comrades for a slap on the back from the right (Social Democrats, I'm looking at you). I don't have to do this to myself.