Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke on Sunday at a gathering of the Jewish community in Frankfurt to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest concentration camp created by the Nazis during World War II. In his remarks, Scholz emphasized Germany’s responsibility to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust and its victims.
“We keep alive the memory of the civilisational split of the Shoah (Holocaust) committed by Germans, which we pass down to each generation in our country again and again: our responsibility will not end,” Scholz said. He stressed that the Holocaust is not just a series of events in the past, but rather “millions of individual stories” that must be remembered and passed down to future generations.
Scholz also highlighted the importance of recognizing the “indisputable facts” of the Holocaust, emphasizing that everyone in Germany, regardless of their origin, family history, or religion, must face these facts. He noted that the normalization of anti-Semitism, hate, and the far right is a “worrying and alarming” trend, particularly on social media, and emphasized that authorities must protect citizens’ lives, particularly those of Jewish people.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, built by Nazi Germany when it occupied Poland during World War II, was a place of unspeakable atrocities, with over 1.1 million people, mainly Jews, perishing from asphyxiation in gas chambers, starvation, exhaustion, and disease. Scholz’s comments serve as a powerful reminder of the importance of remembering and learning from the past to prevent such tragedies from occurring again.