slogans on a slab of the Holocaust memorial
Photo: Bild.de
A man has been arrested after spray-painting anti-Semitic graffiti on Berlin's Holocaust memorial. Police said a security guard caught the intoxicated 28-year-old man from eastern Germany on Tuesday evening as he was spray-painting four of the slabs that make up the vast memorial. A police statement said the man had sprayed "words and figures, some of them with anti-Semitic significance" on the slabs.
According to the German newspaper "Bild", the man sprayed the numbers "884" on one of the slabs – a synonym for "Heil Hitler Deutschland" (H as the eighth letter of the alphabet and D the fourth). An onlooker told the newspaper: "He was spraying for over five minutes. Then an elderly woman asked him to stop. The man started being rude to her. Then the security people arrived. They wanted to take away the aerosol can but he pushed them away showing no respect."
The Berlin memorial to the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust is a field of more than 2,700 gray slabs situated close to Berlin's Brandenburg Gate. It was inaugurated in 2005 and is freely accessible around the clock. Vandalism has been reported there several times.
