Albrecht Weinberg, a Holocaust survivor who endured Auschwitz, Mittelbau-Dora, Bergen-Belsen, and three death marches before becoming a public witness to Nazi atrocities, died Tuesday in Leer, Germany, authorities in his home region said. He was 101.
Weinberg died in the northwestern German town where he had returned late in life after decades in New York. His death came weeks after his 101st birthday and the premiere of a documentary about his life, Es ist immer in meinem Kopf—“It Is Always in My Head”—which drew hundreds of attendees.
Born on March 7, 1925, in Rhauderfehn, near Leer, Weinberg was arrested as a teenager for forced labor and survived several of the Nazi system’s most notorious camps. He lost most of his family in the Holocaust, including his brother Dieter and sister Friedel, according to the Claims Conference’s survivor testimony project.
Leer Mayor Claus-Peter Horst said in a statement that Weinberg used his final years to speak relentlessly about what he had survived. “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,” Horst said.
Weinberg became a familiar figure in schools and public forums, speaking as Germany faced both the dwindling number of living Holocaust witnesses and renewed concern over far-right politics. In 2017, he received Germany’s Order of Merit, but he announced in 2025 that he would return it after a parliamentary migration motion passed with support from the far-right Alternative for Germany party, known by its German initials AfD. The vote broke a long-standing postwar taboo against relying on the far right for a parliamentary majority.
Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, paid tribute to Weinberg 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,” The Associated Press reported.
