Those arriving in Hamburg by ICE train from the south pass directly by the former “Hanoverian Station,” from whose tracks 8,000 Jews, Sinti, and Roma were deported to Nazi extermination camps in the east starting in 1940. A memorial with desk-like concrete tables lists all the names from the transport lists of that time.

Just a few hundred meters away, directly in line of sight to the deportation site, a new opera house is to be built on Hamburg’s Baakenhöft. It is being sponsored with 340 million euros by Klaus-Michael Kühne, 88 years old. The same man who, to this day, refuses to allow his company’s Nazi past to be publicly investigated. His opera house, his gift to the city, therefore carries a deeply troubling connotation.

Meanwhile, a planned documentation centre on the deprotations is still in planning, without any date of completion.

• Neue Oper ja, Zentrum für Dokumentation nein?: Der Umgang mit dem Holocaust. In: NDR. 12.01.2026. https://www.ndr.de/kultur/neue-oper-ja-dokumentationszentrum-nein-der-umgang-mit-dem-holocaust,kulturjournal-296.html