Albrecht Weinberg, a Holocaust survivor who returned to Germany in his later years, died Tuesday in Leer, a city in northwestern Germany, at the age of 101, authorities in his home region said. Officials said Weinberg had survived several Nazi concentration and death camps and lost most of his family in the Holocaust before he went back to Germany in his 80s.
Weinberg died in Leer, according to a statement from the city, weeks after he marked his birthday and attended the premiere of a film about his life, titled “Es ist immer in meinem Kopf” (“It is always in my head”), which officials said drew hundreds of guests. His public appearances in Leer in his later years underscored his role as a witness who continued to speak after the war ended decades ago.
In describing Weinberg’s postwar experiences, authorities said he was born in Rhauderfehn, near Leer, on March 7, 1925, and that he survived incarceration at Auschwitz, Mittelbau-Dora and Bergen-Belsen. They also said he endured three death marches at the end of World War II.
After returning to Germany from New York, Weinberg spent years teaching high school students and others about the atrocities he had lived through, according to the report. Mayor Claus-Peter Horst said Weinberg “recounted tirelessly and with incredible energy his terrible experiences during the Nazi era and warned again and again against forgetting,” describing his return to his East Frisian home 14 years earlier.
Weinberg described the lasting impact of his memories in remarks published in connection with his later life. He said last year that the memories of his wartime experiences still haunted him, adding, “I sleep with it, I wake up with it, I sweat, I have nightmares; that is my present,” and that he worried about what would happen when he was no longer able to bear witness.
In those remarks, Weinberg said, “When my generation is not in this world anymore, when we disappear from the world, then the next generation can only read it out of the book.” The comments reflected his concern about whether the lessons he carried would continue to reach people after the survivors themselves were gone.
Weinberg was awarded Germany’s Order of Merit in 2017, the report said. It added that he handed it back last year in protest at a parliamentary vote in which a motion put forward by Friedrich Merz, now Germany’s chancellor, calling for many more migrants to be turned back at Germany’s borders passed with the help of a far-right party.
After his death, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, wrote on X that he had gotten to know Weinberg well and paid tribute to him as “a bridge — between past and present, between pain and hope, between the dead he could never forget and the young people whom he encouraged to seek the truth.”