Memorial event
Steinmeier: Never again anti-Semitism without contradiction
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has called for anti-Semitism to be countered. Photo: Bernd von Jutrczenka / dpa / archive
© dpa-infocom GmbH
The first Jews were deported to Poland 80 years ago. Federal President Steinmeier has now called at a commemorative event to counter hatred of Jews.
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has called for a determined opposition to racism and hatred of Jews.
“Anti-Semitism must never again have a place in our society,” he said according to the speech manuscript at a memorial event on the Holocaust in Berlin. “Never again must anti-Semitic thinking and acting remain without contradiction and public reactions.” Jews have a natural place in our society. “Jewish culture is not only part of German culture, it has shaped it deeply and has given it richly.”
Steinmeier spoke at an event at the Gleis 17 memorial in Berlin-Grunewald, where the beginning of the deportation of Jewish people to ghettos and extermination camps by the Nazis was commemorated 80 years ago. On October 18, 1941, the first Berlin “Osttransport” with more than 1,000 Jewish children, women and men left the Grunewald train station in the direction of Litzmannstadt (Lodz). In that month, the systematic deportation and thus the murder of the Jewish population began in other places in what was then the German Reich.
Steinmeier: Still guilty
The head of state spoke of an “abysmal, horrific event”. “We Germans are still to blame for the perpetrators, helpers and supporters of the planned murder of European Jews,” said Steinmeier. “We still feel the shame that fellow citizens have been singled out from the midst of society: harassed, disenfranchised, dispossessed – and finally sent on a journey to their death.”
The shocking fact is that the crime occurred before everyone’s eyes. “The exclusion and the collection happened in the middle of everyday German life, that is the cruel truth – even if the actual murder and extermination took place in the conquered and occupied territories in the east.”
Berlin’s Governing Mayor Michael Müller (SPD) also called for memories of the Shoah and the crimes of National Socialism to be kept alive in order to protect democracy from growing right-wing extremism. Freedom, tolerance and democracy are not taken for granted, but have to be constantly defended and, if necessary, fought for anew.