Yad Vashem to Open First Branch Outside Israel in Germany

Memory of the Holocaust may be omnipresent in Israel, but it is fading elsewhere, even in the country where it was planned and by whom it was carried out.

Some 80 years after the end of World War II, a 2025 survey by the Jewish Claims Conference found that roughly 10 to 12% of young adults in Germany had never heard the word "Holocaust." The same study found that around 40% of 18- to 29-year-olds in Germany did not know that six million Jews were murdered during the Nazi era.

That is one of the reasons Yad Vashem — the world's largest Holocaust memorial, based in Jerusalem — is establishing a branch in Germany. It is the first outside Israel. "We do not come to Germany in order to strengthen German democracy or in order to warn against the rise of an extreme right party in Germany," Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan tells DW. "We come to teach about the Holocaust. Educating is a tool in the fight against antisemitism. But I have no doubt that our work will strengthen German democracy and will be a weapon in warning against the rise of a political party that has its roots in in the Nazi ideology, and I will not hesitate to mention it as explicitly: the AfD."

The poison of antisemitism

Jews have been stigmatized and persecuted for more than 2,000 years. They were scapegoated by the Romans during political crises, stigmatized by Christians as "killers of God" and targeted in the Middle Ages by the myth of the Jewish "ritual murder" of Christian children, which triggered show trials and bloody pogroms. Antisemitism as a racist ideology ultimately reached its apex in the Holocaust.

"I thought that after the Shoah and the devastation that it brought to Europe — not only to the Jewish people, but to Germany and to Europe — I thought that at least we would have, I don't know, 100, 200 years free of antisemitism. But yeah, as we see, that it isn't the case, unfortunately," says Dayan. "In a polarized world as we see it in many societies today, the hatred of Jews and the Jewish state has become the lingua franca of all extremists in the world."

Antisemitic attacks are on the rise in Germany, too. The decision to open the Yad Vashem education center in downtown Munich was driven in part by the city's high security standards. Munich's historical significance as the birthplace of the Nazi movement was not the determinant factor — yet the center will be housed in a building on the central Karolinenplatz, the former headquarters of the Nazi Party's Supreme Party Court.

There are also plans to open a second branch in Leipzig. As Dayan emphasizes, these venues are not intended solely for Bavaria and Saxony — they are meant for audiences from across Germany. "It's very important to bring the Jewish perspective of the Holocaust, the perspective of the victims and the survivors to Germany, the land of the perpetrators," he says.

Germany already has no shortage of memorials, museums and monuments dedicated to the horrors of the Holocaust. So what will the Yad Vashem in Munich do differently? "It is not intended as a museum with exhibits and original artifacts belonging to murdered Jews," emphasizes Dayn, but rather as an interactive educational center.

Details about what that will look like in practice remain scarce.

Meron Mendel, a German-Israeli journalist and director of the Anne Frank Educational Center in Frankfurt, has questioned why the German Yad Vashem branches weren't integrated into existing institutions specializing in Holocaust education, such as the Nazi Documentation Center in Munich. After all, Dayan has praised Germany's efforts to come to terms with Nazi crimes.

When the entrepreneur and former US government representative Elon Musk stated at an AfD party conference in January 2025 that Germany should leave its culture of remembrance behind, Dayan was appalled. He said the remarks were not only an insult to the victims and survivors of the Shoah, but also a threat to German democracy.

Criticism of Yad Vashem: How political is the institution?

When news broke that Yad Vashem would be opening centers in Munich and Leipzig, German politicians responded with uniform enthusiasm — including those from the AfD.

There was however criticism from Meron Mendel. He argued in several news outlets that Yad Vashem is not independent: It answers to the Israeli government, which is currently dominated by far-right politicians who have a "clear interest" in defining antisemitism in ways that would make criticism of Israel fall under that label, said Mendel. In his view, there's a chance that an institution under that government's authority could easily end up reflecting its agenda.

Dayan is himself no stranger to controversy. From 2007 to 2013, he chaired the Yesha Council, the umbrella organization for Jewish settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories — an occupation the International Court of Justice has stated in an advisory opinion violates international law. He later served as Israel's consul general in New York from 2016 to 2020.

When he was appointed chairman of Yad Vashem in 2021, many worried the remembrance institution would be drawn into politics. Dayan pledged it would not. "I have created a virtual firewall between myself and politics. The mission I have taken on is sacred to me, and I will never tarnish it," he said at the time.

Mendel's accusations of politicization are simply wrong, Dayan tells DW. "Yad Vashem is a state institution but is not a governmental institution. Yad Vashem is completely independent. The idea that we are a tool of a certain government — this government, any other government — is completely false." He says he can point to numerous cases where Yad Vashem and the Israeli government have taken not just different but diametrically opposing positions.

He also notes that the Netanyahu government had already tried to push him out — a threat that was ultimately beaten back in 2023, with support from the broader scholarly community. "We are watching with great concern the recent attacks by the Israeli education minister on Dani Dayan," 123 Holocaust researchers from around the world wrote in an open letter. He "serves the institution in an outstanding manner, enabling Yad Vashem to maintain its independent and nonpartisan character."

What happens when there are no more eyewitnesses?

For Dayan, the urgency of the moment comes down to one thing: keeping the memory of the Holocaust's six million Jewish victims alive at a time when the last survivors are dying. "The formative experience of listening to a survivor tell his or her story in front of us will not exist for the children that are born today," he says, expressing doubt that artificial intelligence can fill that void.

Yad Vashem has been experimenting with other ways to reach visitors emotionally — through theatrical productions and immersive experiences that use music and large-scale projections to draw people into the vanished Jewish world destroyed by the Holocaust.

Dayan worries that once the last survivors are gone, Holocaust deniers will find it easier to spread their lies. The world is not back in the 1930s, he says — but it is heading in that direction.

What makes today different, he argues, is that no one can claim ignorance anymore: "There is one difference between the generation of the 1930s and the contemporary generation. People in the 1930s had the privilege — indeed, the naivety — to say: They may burn books or set fire to synagogues, but they would never burn people. In 2026, we don't have that privilege, because we know that once it has happened, it can happen a second time."

This article was originally written in German.