“Hope is always connected with activity.”

Steffen Hänschen’s tireless work exposes Eastern European Holocaust history and brings together Germans and Poles

by Toby Axelrod

Steffen Hänschen has always been a bit of a rebel. As a teen in the late 1970s, he took to the streets when old SS-men marched in his hometown, Cologne. He was part of the “squatter” movement in Germany in the 1980s, fixing up abandoned buildings. And he dug into Germany’s Nazi history before it was popular to do so. Back then, he was keenly aware that “there are all these perpetrators around,” but very little knowledge about history. 

And so an activist was born. “Hope is always connected with activity,” says Hänschen, 64, who since 2000 has volunteered for a Kassel-based Holocaust education center, Bildungswerk Stanisław Hantz. The center is named for a Polish survivor of Auschwitz.

In that role, Hänschen has organized and conducted educational trips for people of all ages to sites of Holocaust history in present-day Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine, often accompanied by survivors or their descendants. Hänschen is committed to Holocaust commemoration through the construction and design of memorial sites, plaques, stones, and events, as well as by supporting remembrance and research work by pupils and students in cooperation with schools.

He also engages with the public through essays and speeches, addressing issues of prejudice, antisemitism, and Holocaust remembrance.

His in-depth research, particularly on the ghetto established by the Germans in Izbica, Poland, and on the three “Aktion Reinhardt” extermination camps, is a major contribution to the literature on the crimes committed against the Jews of Europe. (Aktion Reinhardt is the name the Nazis gave to their plan to exterminate Jews living in Poland.) In 2018 his 600-page book on “The Transit Ghetto in Izbica in the System of the Holocaust: Deportations in the Lublin District in Early Summer 1942” (Das Transitghetto Izbica im System des Holocaust: Die Deportationen in den Distrikt Lublin im Frühsommer 1942) was published, to critical acclaim. [https://www.hagalil.com/2019/02/transitghetto-izbica/]

Elke Möller, his Bildungswerk colleague, calls the book “an extremely important contribution to understanding the crimes and the boundless injustice committed against the Jewish population of Europe.”

Hänschen, she says, “is always willing to share the knowledge and insights he has gained with others. His work is selfless, his motivation is the desire to contribute to honoring the victims, combating antisemitism and all other forms of discrimination, and preventing further crimes against humanity.”

In addition to sharing his knowledge about history, Hänschen aims to build bridges with other European communities, to confront long-standing prejudices among Germans towards eastern Europe, and to bring Bildungswerk participants — most of them German — into contact with survivors and eyewitnesses. [https://bildungswerk-ks.de/]

Hänschen could hardly be a busier man. In addition to his volunteer work, and for about the same number of years, he has been teaching German as a second language at Babylonia, a Berlin center for language-learning that also hosts political discussions, cultural presentations, and exhibitions. Many of Hänschen’s students there are refugees.

Both his professional and volunteer work are informed by his interest in history and language. Hänschen wrote a doctoral thesis on Polish literature; as a young man in Berlin, he volunteered as an interpreter for Polish visitors to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial. 

Through Bildungswerk he has met numerous witnesses to history and has become a vessel for their memories. “For me, and for us, it was important to be active in this remembrance culture,” he says. 

He sees it as a calling and a responsibility. As the late survivor Tomasz Blatt once told him, “The story will be forgotten when there are no people left to tell it.”

“Living in a perpetrator society”

Hänschen was born and raised in Cologne, in a Protestant family. Back then, old Nazis were still plentiful in all walks of life, he recalls.

“I grew up knowing that I’m living in a perpetrator society,” says Hänschen. His immediate family, though, was decidedly anti-Nazi. His father had been forced to join the Wehrmacht at 16, like many teenage boys near the end of World War II. He soon deserted, along with other troops, in a battle with the British army in Bremen. Later, he and his wife named their daughters Ruth and Miriam, out of a sense of solidarity with the Jewish people.

Hänschen spent several years living in Amsterdam before moving to Berlin in 2000, where he started working for Babylonia and volunteering for Bildungswerk. For the latter, he organized study trips to the Lublin area, to the former Nazi German death camps at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. Eventually, he added trips to Lithuania and Ukraine. 

Over the years, he built connections with eyewitnesses, survivors, and descendants, as well as with municipal leaders, local Jewish communities, and remembrance workers. 

One of the witnesses was Stanislaw Hantz, who had begun accompanying Bildungswerk study groups to Auschwitz in 1997. Hantz told visitors how the German military had arrested him and other young Polish men in August 1940, when he was 17. They were taken to Auschwitz, where Hantz was forced to work as a carpenter. He witnessed terrible conditions and torture in the camp for 35 months; Hantz was liberated by the U.S. Army at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, in April 1945.

Decades later, “Staszek started to be interested in Jewish history, which for Polish people was not always so easy,” recalls Hänschen, using Hantz’s nickname.

In 1982, Hantz founded the Zgorzelec Association of Former Concentration Camp Prisoners (Zgorzelec is a Polish city on the border with Germany) and began speaking in schools about his memories. It was during a speaking tour in Germany in the 1990s that he met members of Bildungswerk, which was eventually named for him.

After Hantz's death in 2008, the Bildungswerk team carried on for him, sharing his stories with trip participants.

“People feel acknowledged”

“The survivors were always really important for us,” says Hänschen. “We tried always to be in touch with them and to integrate them in our educational program.”

Hänschen met Sobibor survivor Tomasz Blatt on one of the Bildungswerk trips. Blatt, who had grown up in Izbica, Poland, and escaped the extermination camp in the 1943 uprising, emigrated to the United States after the war. Author of several memoirs, he often spoke with visitors to the camp memorial. Blatt died in 2015.

“He was always coming back to Izbica and Sobibor,” says Hänschen. “When we'd be there, coincidentally he was also there.” And so Bildungswerk invited him to visit Germany. “It was really, really important for him that the stories are told.”

Today, Blatt’s daughter, Rena Blatt Smith, speaks at schools in Izbica, invited by Bildungswerk. Such visits help validate the remembrance work being done locally, says Hänschen. “People feel acknowledged for what they are doing.”

“We also had a video call with pupils from different schools in Sobibor, where she talked about her father” and her childhood, says Hänschen. “We think that this personal approach is important.”

It’s important to Blatt Smith, as well: Hänschen “gave me the opportunity to learn about and experience aspects of my family history that were unknown to me,”she says. “[He] made it possible for me to share my father's experiences as a survivor of the Sobibor Nazi death camp with others, especially with the school children in my father's village in Izbica. His dedicated work in many other remembrance projects in Sobibor, Belzec, and other places has changed the lives of many people.”

Such encounters have changed Hänschen’s life, too. “I'm lucky that I could speak with them,” he says. “It's a privilege because now I can tell the stories to other people.”

The age range of recent trip participants was 22 to 70, and they have diverse motivations. Some of the older ones always wanted to make such a journey but didn’t manage until they retired. And for some of the younger ones, “it's a part of their antifascist work to learn what happened there,” Hänschen explains. Still others “are dealing with it because of family issues – either the perpetrator or the victim side.” Other participants might be professionals from museums or memorials.

Educator Christa Horn of Lisberg, Germany, took part in an educational trip to Lublin. She lauds “Mr. Hänschen's dedicated work, and especially the passing on of the memory to future generations, which he does both in Germany and in the eastern European countries.” The work, she says, is “not only absolutely necessary, but also incredibly inspiring and motivating.”

Such journeys are more important than ever, given the popularity of some extreme right-wing ideas in Germany today, says Hänschen.

“The perpetrators then, I think they were like normal people,” says Hänschen, who recently participated in publishing the wartime photo album of SS-man Johann Niemann, the deputy commander of Sobibor. (From "Euthanasia" to Sobibor: An SS Officer's Photo Collection) https://www.jta.org/quick-reads/photos-surface-showing-convicted-nazi-war-criminal-john-demjanjuk-at-sobibor-camp

The album shows SS-men and their families “having fun, they're playing chess, they're making music. They're difficult photos because they show normal people in a normal life,” says, Hänschen. “When people are enjoying a good life, they want things to stay as they are.” 

He strongly believes that people today are less likely to be drawn in by extreme right ideology if they “learn about what happened there, and think about it.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2025