Ms. Merkel noted that his visit comes in a context of rising anti-semitism and historical revisionism and promised that Germany would not tolerate anti-semitism. She said that Germany remained determined to remember the crimes it committed against Jews, Poles, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals and others.
Addressing a gathering that included former inmates of Auschwitz, she said that she felt “deeply ashamed in the face of the crimes of barbarians committed by the Germans here.”
“Nothing can bring back the people who were murdered here. Nothing can reverse the crime without a previous committed here. These crimes are, and will remain in the German history and this history must be told again and again, ” she said.
She described this responsibility as a key element of German national identity today.
Mrs Merkel has also made a donation of 60 million euros ($66.6 million). The money will go to a fund to preserve the physical remains of the site – the barracks, the watchtowers, and personal items such as shoes and suitcases of the people killed.
Together, these objects persist as evidence of the atrocities the German and as one of the most recognizable symbols in the world of the ability of humanity to do evil. But they deteriorate also under the pressure of time and of mass tourism, which leads to a conservation effort for the long term.
Accompanied by the Polish Prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, Ms. Merkel has begun to see a crematorium and walk under the door with the words the notorious “Arbeit Macht Frei”. It was an expression of cynicism which meant ” work will set you free “, while the truth was that the prisoners were subjected to the immediate execution of scientific experiments, painful or forced labor.
Merkel and Morawiecki went to the side of the place of executions, where they have dropped the head in front of the two crowns bearing the colors of their nation. The stay of several hours, which also included a visit to the conservation lab, where old leather shoes were arranged on a table, a nd laying of candles at Birkenau, the part of the vast complex where the Jews were subjected to massacres in the gas chambers.
The donation to the Auschwitz Foundation is in addition to the 60 million euros that Germany was given at the launch of the fund ten years ago, according to the State museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
This brings the total gift of Germany to 120 million euros and is Germany by far the most generous of the 38 countries that have contributed to it. As for the gift back, the half comes from the federal government and the other half of the German States, a recognition of the responsibility of the German nation.
Since she became chancellor in 2005, Merkel has paid tribute to other nazi concentration camps, and she has been five times to Yad Vashem, the museum and the Holocaust memorial in Israel.
However, the Polish ministry of foreign Affairs has described his visit as”historic,” in recognition evident of the unique status of Auschwitz in the collective memory of the world. The ministry also noted that it was only the third visit of a head of the German government.
The German forces, the nazis killed an estimated 1.1 million people in the complex at Auschwitz-Birkenau during their occupation of Poland during the Second world War. Most of the victims were Jews transported from across Europe to be killed in the gas chambers. But tens of thousands of others have also been killed, including Poles, soviet prisoners of war and Roma, or Gypsies. The camp was liberated by the soviet army on 27 January 1945.
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Gera reported from Warsaw.