Albert Meyer, the chairman of the city's Jewish community, has revoked permission for the Berlin City Senate to award a major prize in a Berlin synagogue, after discovering it was going to Hilde Schramm, 68, the daughter of Albert Speer, Hitler's "friend, architect and munitions minister."
He claims that "Some of his members had been made slave workers by Speer... and, despite his respect for Mrs Schramm, it would be an affront to honour a Speer descendant in a synagogue."
Sounds reasonable -- and Schramm herself is supporting Meyer on this. But the £6,700 prize is for Schramm's work in supporting tolerance and forgiveness among Berlin's Jews. She set up a fund to give financial assistance to Jewish women wanting to undertake artistic or scientific projects, and worked on other projects that help former slave workers and other Nazi victims in the former Soviet Union, where other aid is not available.
It's a shame Berlin's Jews can't show some of that same tolerance and forgiveness towards a woman who herself was not guilty of anything, and whose work for the Jewish community is all the more, not less, remarkable because of who her father was.
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