“We had almost given up hope and a replica had been made and installed at the original place,” Gabriele Hammermann, the head of the memorial site, said as the gate was returned, according to the AP.

The news service reported that the now-returned gate is not expected to replace the replica, but will instead be used in an exhibition and housed in a glass cabinet that has an alarm. According to Deutsche Welle, the gate will be “publicly unveiled” in April, on the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of the camp.

“This is a meaningful day for the memorial,” Ludwig Spaenle, the Bavarian minister of cultural affairs, told Deutsche Welle.

The iron gate, which reportedly weighs about 220 pounds, was stolen in November 2014. Police told Deutsche Welle that the culprit (or culprits) would not have been able to get to it without scaling another gate. The theft was not captured on security cameras, and it apparently happened when guards were making their rounds, Deutsche Welle reported.

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According to Deutsche Welle, Karl Freller, head of the foundation of memorial sites in Bavaria, called the theft an “ignoble act.”

Late last year, however, the gate was located in Norway, following an anonymous tip, according to reports. And in Deutsche Welle’s report on the sign’s return, Freller is quoted as saying: “Now that we have the gate back, we will not let it out of our sight.”

AP reported that Hammermann, the head of the memorial site, called the theft “one of the worst attacks on the Dachau camp memorial.” The news service reported that according to Hammermann, survivors felt it was important that the investigation into the matter continues, though Reuters, quoting a senior police officer in Norway, reported that the case had been closed.

The Dachau concentration camp, located not far from Munich, opened in 1933 and was liberated by American forces in April 1945. As Reuters notes, the camp “became the prototype for a network of concentration camps at which some 6 million Jews were murdered.”

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More than 200,000 people from across Europe were held at the Dachau concentration camp and its subsidiary camps, according to the memorial site's website. More than 40,000 people died there.

Vice President Pence, along with his wife and daughter, toured Dachau earlier this month.

Here’s Deutsche Welle, with more background on the “arbeit macht frei” slogan on the Dachau concentration camp gate, which was found at other camps as well:

The phrase is considered one of the most cynical examples of Nazi propaganda language. Many of the people forced into extermination camps were forced to work without any compensation, literally working themselves to death in countless cases. The iron gate itself was a product of forced labor at the Dachau: communist prisoner Karl Röder was forced by Nazi officials to forge the “Arbeit macht frei” slogan.

The phrase “Arbeit macht frei” is also found on a sign above the entrance to Auschwitz. That sign was stolen in 2009, but later recovered in pieces. The Jewish intellectual Primo Levi survived a year at Auschwitz. Here’s what he wrote on the now-infamous phrase:

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The concentration camp at Auschwitz was created relatively late, and was conceived from the start not as a work camp but as an extermination camp. It became a work camp later, in 1943, and then only in partial and subsidiary fashion. I think we can therefore exclude the hypothesis that in the intention of the person who coined it, this phrase was to be understood in its straightforwarded sense and for its obvious proverbial and moral value. It is more likely that the meaning is ironic, springing from the heavy, arrogant, funereal wit to which only Germans are privy, and which only in German has a name. translated into explicit language it should, it seems, have gone something like this: ‘Work is humiliation and suffering, and is fit not for us, the Herrenvolk, the people of masters and heroes, but for you, enemies of the Third Reich. The only freedom which awaits you is death.’

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The return of the gate comes as many in the United States and abroad are focused on anti-Semitic violence and threats. President Trump earlier this week denounced anti-Semitic threats, reading prepared remarks during a visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

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“This tour was a meaningful reminder of why we have to fight bigotry, intolerance and hatred in all of its very ugly forms,” Trump said. “The anti-Semitic threats targeting our Jewish community and community centers are horrible and are painful and a very sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil.”

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Those remarks were not enough for Steven Goldstein, executive director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, who on Tuesday blasted the statement.

“His statement today is a pathetic asterisk of condescension after weeks in which he and his staff have committed grotesque acts and omissions reflecting Antisemitism, yet day after day have refused to apologize and correct the record,” Goldstein said in the statement. “Make no mistake: The Antisemitism coming out of this Administration is the worst we have ever seen from any Administration.”

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