German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has apologized for Nazi crimes on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In a ceremony held today with the presidents of Poland and Israel, Andrzej Duda and Izchak Herzog, respectively, Steinmeier acknowledged his country’s responsibility for the extermination of Jews and expressed his gratitude for the reconciliation between the two countries and Germany.
Also for the invitation to a ceremony that had never before been attended by the German head of state and that Steinmeier described as an “infinitely precious gift”. “I stand before you today, in mourning and with humility, to ask your forgiveness for the crimes that the Germans committed here,” he said in a speech delivered outside the Ghetto Heroes Monument in the Polish capital.
Steinmeier acknowledged that the Germans meticulously planned and carried out the crime against humanity of the Shoa, that they “persecuted, enslaved and murdered the Jews of Europe, the Jews of Warsaw, with a cruelty and inhumanity for which we have no words.” “. He assured that the Germans are aware of their responsibility and of the mission that the survivors and the dead have left them. “We accept it. For us Germans, the responsibility before our history knows no end. It remains a memory and a mission in the present and in the future”, affirmed the German president, for whom the most important lesson of German history is “Never again!”. And never again, it means that there should be no criminal war of aggression in Europe like Russia’s against Ukraine. “We support Ukraine humanitarianly, politically and militarily, together with Poland and our allies,” Steinmeier said. The president noted that those who rose up against the German occupiers in 1943 were “the heroes of Israel, the heroes of the Jews of the whole world, they are the heroes of Poland and of the Poles.” Duda stressed that, with their courage, the insurgents were a model for Israeli and Polish soldiers who guard the borders of their countries. For his part, Herzog emphasized the aspect of reconciliation , stating that the Jews murdered at the time could not have imagined “that 80 years later we would be here, the presidents of Poland, Israel and Germany, honoring their heroism and swearing together in their sacred memory: Never again!”. Warsaw was established by the German occupiers in the fall of 1940. Some 450,000 people were trapped there. In 1942, the Nazis began deporting them to death and labor camps. Between July and September, between 250,000 and 280,000 people were deported or killed. When SS units entered the ghetto on April 19, 1943, the uprising of the only lightly armed Jewish resistance began. The fighting lasted until mid-May. More than 56,000 Jews were killed or deported to concentration and extermination camps.
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