Berlin Exhibition Honours Germans Who Helped Jews

The exhibition, which is permanent, commemorates many individuals whose actions have been unknown to the wider public until now.

The first exhibition commemorating Germany's "silent heroes" who helped Jews escape Nazi persecution during the Holocaust opened in Berlin on Tuesday.

The exhibition consists of photographs, letters and other documents from some of the 20,000 non-Jews in Germany who risked their lives giving Jews food, shelter or a place to work in the period from 1938 to 1945.

"There are many memorial sites dedicated to those targeted by the Nazis, but there has never been one which is solely dedicated to these heroes," said Johannes Tuchel, director of an umbrella organisation for memorials of resistance to the Nazis.

After more than 60 years of trying to understand how Germans could have supported Hitler, many still fear any apparent justification or evasion of responsibility for Nazism.

Tuchel said the "Silent Heroes" exhibition had not opened sooner because the issue of resistance to the Nazis was so sensitive in Germany.

Andre Schmitz, who is responsible for culture in the Berlin city government, said the location of the exhibition -- in the bustling Mitte district -- was also significant.

"It is just a stone's throw away from a former paintbrush-making factory, where anti-Nazi activist Otto Weidt illegally gave deaf and blind Jews shelter and an opportunity to work during Hitler's reign," he told the Berliner Zeitung daily.

The exhibition, which is permanent, commemorates many individuals whose actions have been unknown to the wider public until now. But it also includes photographs and pieces of writing by Oskar Schindler.

Schindler, upon whom Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning 1993 film "Schindler's List" is based, was a businessman who employed more than 1,100 Jews in his factory and helped save them from deportation to the concentration camps.