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Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Sunday that Germany had a responsibility to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust committed by Germans during World War II.
“I am against turning the page, saying ‘that was long ago’,” Scholz told a gathering of the Jewish community in Frankfurt to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis’ largest concentration camp, Auschwitz.
“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,” he said.
The Holocaust is “millions of individual stories”, people “like you and me — it is also this awareness that we must pass down in our remembrance”, he added.
This collective memory is based on “indisputable facts that everyone in our country must face regardless of origin, family history or religion”, he said.
Scholz also underlined the “worrying and alarming normalisation” of anti-Semitism, hate and the far right, especially on social media where this was often accompanied by calls to violence.
This hate “puts in danger citizens’ lives, especially those who are Jewish” and the authorities must protect them, he said.
More than one million people died at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp built by Nazi Germany when it occupied Poland in World War II — most of them Jews, but also non-Jewish Poles, Roma and Soviet soldiers.
Of the more than 1.3 million people imprisoned there, 1.1 million — mainly Jews — perished, either from asphyxiation in the gas chambers or from starvation, exhaustion and disease.
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