Albrecht Weinberg, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust and was imprisoned in Auschwitz, Mittelbau-Dora and Bergen-Belsen, died at his home in Leer, Germany, on Tuesday, the city said. He was 101 years old and had spent the last 14 years of his life in his birthplace region, tirelessly recounting his experiences to ensure that the crimes of the Nazi era are not forgotten.
“Since returning from New York to his East Frisian home 14 years ago, Albrecht recounted tirelessly and with incredible energy his terrible experiences during the Nazi era and warned again and again against forgetting,” Leer’s mayor, Claus-Peter Horst, said in a statement.
The deaths came weeks after the premiere of a documentary about his life, “Es ist immer in meinem Kopf” (“It is always in my head”), which drew hundreds of guests. Weinberg, who was born in Rhauderfehn on March 7, 1925, survived three death marches as Allied forces closed in at the end of World War II. He emigrated to the United States and worked as a butcher before deciding in his 80s to return to Germany and testify before the next generation.
In an interview last year, he said the terror of the camps never left him. “I sleep with it, I wake up with it, I sweat, I have nightmares; that is my present,” he said. He worried that soon there would be no one left to speak from personal memory. “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,” he said.
Weinberg was awarded Germany’s Order of Merit in 2017 but handed it back in 2025 after a motion proposed by Friedrich Merz, now the country’s chancellor, calling for many more migrants to be turned back at Germany’s borders passed with the support of the far-right Alternative for Germany party. The handback underscored Weinberg’s conviction that Germany must not align itself with the same nativist forces that defined the regime he survived.
Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, paid tribute on X, calling Weinberg “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.”