King Charles III ended his historic visit to Germany on Friday with a memorial stopover in Hamburg, a gesture of high symbolic significance 80 years after deadly Allied raids.
On the last day of his first foreign visit as king, Charles III boarded an ICE high-speed train in the colors of Germany with Queen Consort Camilla.
Destination Hamburg, the country’s second city, with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
At the end of a journey of nearly two hours by train, extremely rare in the context of a State visit, the sovereign laid a wreath at the Dammtor station in the rain at the foot of a monument to the memory of Jewish children sent to Great Britain to escape Nazism.
He then went to the Saint-Nicolas church, destroyed by British and American aerial bombardments in 1943, for a moment of meditation alongside the German president, a moral authority in the country.
The visit to this church, left in ruins and which serves as a memorial, is seen in Germany as a sign of responsibility and reconciliation of “great importance”, more significant than “any speech”, according to the popular daily Picture.
“The sign of reconciliation between two war enemies and the joint commemoration of the victims is an important signal,” said the Bishop of Hamburg, Kirsten Fehrs, who delivered the Coventry Litany of Reconciliation on Friday.
Addressing the suffering endured by German civilians during the Second World War remains a very delicate and often taboo subject in a country responsible for the death of six million Jews under Nazism.
It is a question of finding a “difficult balance between the past and the future”, estimated Rainald Erbacher, questioned among the many curious who waited for Charles in the rain of Hamburg.
The sovereign’s tribute on Friday “sends a positive signal”, commented this 54-year-old engineer.
On July 24, 1943, Great Britain and the United States launched Operation Gomorrah, which cost the lives of more than 30,000 people in Hamburg.
It was one of the deadliest air attacks along with the bombardment of Dresden to the east.
Elizabeth II, who died last year, visited the Church of Our Lady in Dresden in 1992, a symbol of the destruction of war and rebuilt since. But she had been received at the time by egg throws.
These aerial bombardments remain among the most controversial actions of war undertaken by the Allies, as they were intended to terrorize the population and force Hitler’s regime to surrender, at the cost of tens of thousands of civilian casualties.
The German far right often cites the suffering endured during these bombings to exonerate themselves from the guilt linked to Nazism, which has marked the country since the 1970s.
German-British rapprochement and the future of relations between the two countries were among the main themes of Charles III’s three-day visit.
The sovereign also devoted several moments of his stay, which began on Tuesday, to the discovery of environmental projects, like the green technologies used by the port of Hamburg to reduce its carbon footprint.
The move of Charles III was an important European gesture after the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union.
First monarch to speak on Thursday in the Bundestag, he deplored the return of the “scourge” of war in Europe, referring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, assuring that the allies can “draw courage from their unity.
31/03/2023 18:01:44 – Hamburg (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
