German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke at a gathering of the Jewish community in Frankfurt on Sunday to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Nazis’ largest concentration camp.
Scholz said in remarks at the commemoration, “Jewish life, that is Frankfurt. Jewish life, that is Germany. That is us.”
In Frankfurt, Scholz said Germany has a responsibility to preserve the memory of the genocide committed by Germans during World War II.
Scholz also underlined the “worrying and dangerous normalization” of anti-Semitism, hatred and the far right, particularly on social media.
“The Internet and social networks in particular often become hotbeds of extremist positions, incitement and hatred,” Scholz warned.
German responsibility ‘will not end’
More than one million people died at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in occupied Poland during World War II, the majority of whom were Jews, but also included non-Jewish Poles, Roma, and Soviet soldiers.
“I’m against turning the page saying, ‘That was a long time ago,'” Scholz said.
“We keep alive the memory of civilizational disintegration “The Shoah (Holocaust) perpetrated by the Germans is something we hand over again and again to every generation in our country: our responsibility will not end,” he said.
The Holocaust is “millions of individual stories,” he said, “of people like you and me. It is also this awareness that we should keep in our memory.”
This collective memory, Scholz said, is based on “undeniable facts that everyone in our country faces regardless of origin, family history or religion.”
jcg/jsi (AFP, dpa)
