Schroeder expresses shame over Auschwitz
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-01-26 15:11

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder expressed shame Tuesday over the horrors of the Nazi era, acknowledging that Adolf Hitler's regime enjoyed wide support among Germans and promising that his country will always try to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust.

Across Europe, commemorations ahead of the 60th anniversary of the Red Army's liberation of the Auschwitz death camp on Jan. 27, 1945, were tinged with the pain of memories — and concern that anti-Semitism lives on.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder speaks in front of a photo showing a way in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, during a commemoration of the International Auschwitz Committee marking the 60th Anniversary of the liberation of concentration camps Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2005. The International Auschwitz Committee is an organisation of survivors of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. [AP]

"I express my shame in the face of those who were murdered — and, above all, you who survived the hell of the concentration camps," a somber Schroeder told an audience at a Berlin theater that included Auschwitz survivors.

"The overwhelming majority of Germans living today bears no guilt for the Holocaust, but they do bear a special responsibility."

Some 1.5 million prisoners — most of them Jews — perished in gas chambers or died of starvation and disease at Auschwitz. In all, 6 million Jews were killed in Nazi camps, along with several million others, including Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, homosexuals and political opponents of the Nazis.

Alluding to the fact that the Nazis were democratically elected, Schroeder said the genocide could not be reduced to "the old talk of 'the demon Hitler.'"

"The evil of Nazi ideology did not come from nowhere," Schroeder said. "The brutalization of thought and the loss of moral inhibitions had a history; above all, Nazi ideology was desired by people and man-made."

Leaders across Europe marked the anniversary with warnings that the battle against anti-Semitism continues. Inaugurating his country's new Holocaust memorial, French President Jacques Chirac called for stronger efforts to quell a rise in attacks on Jews in France.

"Anti-Semitism is not an opinion. It is a perversion — a perversion that kills," said Chirac, who bowed before a wall inscribed with the names of 76,000 Jews sent to Nazi death camps from France. Only 2,500 of the deportees survived.

Europe's top human rights body, the Council of Europe, flew its flags at half-staff in Strasbourg, France, and its parliamentary assembly held a minute of silence. Its secretary general, Terry Davis, urged citizens and governments to "live up to their responsibility" to ensure that genocide in Europe never happens again.

The chairman of the World Jewish Congress, Israel Singer, said Europe has much to do.

"Shamefully, the lessons borne from this continental introspection have been forgotten so quickly, one wonders if they were ever taught widely at all," Singer said at the commemoration in Berlin. "We experience insensitivity toward the Holocaust by Europe's younger generation."

He called for the establishment of a European commission to spread information about the Holocaust while survivors are still alive.

"Only those who experienced it can make it believable to others," said Noach Flug, an Auschwitz survivor and the president of the International Auschwitz Committee, which organized the Berlin memorial.

"We wanted to survive with the aim of telling and describing to the world the atrocities, the incomprehensible cruelty that we saw."

Schroeder pledged Germany will do its part to ensure the Holocaust was not forgotten.

"Remembering the era of National Socialism and its crimes is a moral obligation. We owe that not only to the victims, the survivors and the relatives, but to ourselves," he said. "It is true that the temptation to forget and suppress it is great, but we will not succumb to it."

He also said German leaders would protect the country's growing Jewish community "with the power of the state against the anti-Semitism of the incorrigible."

"That there is still anti-Semitism cannot be denied," he added. "Fighting it is the task of all society."

Another former Auschwitz prisoner, Kurt Julius Goldstein, recalled being forced onto a "death march" westward away from the advancing Soviet army, saying that fewer than 500 prisoners in the 3,000-strong column survived.

Auschwitz "is the biggest cemetery in the whole world," Goldstein said. "None of them has a memorial stone — the Nazis wanted them to be forgotten. We have a duty to prevent that."

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